Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisLiterary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius's text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, John Gower's Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve's autobiographical poetry and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

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Book SynopsisFrom Edison's invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this sonic flux. Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.

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Book SynopsisImmanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790. Going against the grain of all aesthetic theories situated in the Hegelian tradition, this provocative thesis, which already guided de Duve's groundbreaking book Kant After Duchamp (1996), is here pursued in order to demonstrate that far from confining aesthetics to a stifling formalism isolated from all worldly concerns, Kant's guidance urgently opens the understanding of art onto ethics and politics. Central to de Duve's re-reading of the Critique of Judgment is Kant's idea of sensus communis, ultimately interpreted as the mere yet necessary idea that human beings are capable of living in peace with one another. De Duve pushes Kant's skepticism to its limits by submitting the idea of sensus communis to various tests leading to questions such as: Do artists speak on behal

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Book SynopsisA discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image. Topics addressed in the book include the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the relations between law, the image and identity.

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Book SynopsisA discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image. Topics addressed in the book include the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the relations between law, the image and identity.

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Book SynopsisOver the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of good musichighly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly originaland, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals. In Good Music, John J. Sheinbaum explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, Bruce Springsteen, and prog rock, he argues that metaphors of perfection do justice to neither the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music in question. Instead, he proposes an alternative model of appreciation where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what

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Book SynopsisOver the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of good musichighly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly originaland, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals. In Good Music, John J. Sheinbaum explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, Bruce Springsteen, and prog rock, he argues that metaphors of perfection do justice to neither the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music in question. Instead, he proposes an alternative model of appreciation where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“At long last a collection in English that does justice to the breadth, depth, and contemporary significance of Simmel’s writings on the arts! With many new translations and a wide-ranging introduction, Harrington’s volume portrays the influential modernist philosopher and pioneering cultural theorist in deep and critical engagement with a rapidly changing world. A powerful testament to Simmel’s conception of philosophical culture—and to the transdisciplinary significance of a thinker whose achievements continue to resist disciplinary categorization.” -- Elizabeth Goodstein, Emory University“Georg Simmel is known in sociology for many things: the structure of social groups, the philosophy of money, metaphysical essays on life, individuality and social forms, the metropolis, and social differentiation. However, apart from the publication of Rembrandt in 2005, Simmel’s fascinating studies of culture, literature, and art forms have been neglected. Therefore, we owe Austin Harrington a serious debt of gratitude for editing and translating Simmel’s diverse publications on the theatre, sculpture, style and representation, and aesthetics into a single volume. In addition, I strongly recommend Harrington’s modestly entitled ‘Introduction’ as a comprehensive and meticulous commentary on Simmel and contemporary evaluations of his oeuvre. This volume will deepen and expand our understanding of the Simmel legacy for years to come.” -- Bryan S. Turner, Australian Catholic University and the Graduate Centre CUNY"The long and detailed introduction that Harrington provides is probably one of the best introductions to Simmel's works. . . Harrington's goal of providing the reader with a complete and well-structured collection of the most important Simmel essays on art and aesthetics in just one book is fully achieved." * Simmel Studies *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“At long last a collection in English that does justice to the breadth, depth, and contemporary significance of Simmel’s writings on the arts! With many new translations and a wide-ranging introduction, Harrington’s volume portrays the influential modernist philosopher and pioneering cultural theorist in deep and critical engagement with a rapidly changing world. A powerful testament to Simmel’s conception of philosophical culture—and to the transdisciplinary significance of a thinker whose achievements continue to resist disciplinary categorization.” -- Elizabeth Goodstein, Emory University“Georg Simmel is known in sociology for many things: the structure of social groups, the philosophy of money, metaphysical essays on life, individuality and social forms, the metropolis, and social differentiation. However, apart from the publication of Rembrandt in 2005, Simmel’s fascinating studies of culture, literature, and art forms have been neglected. Therefore, we owe Austin Harrington a serious debt of gratitude for editing and translating Simmel’s diverse publications on the theatre, sculpture, style and representation, and aesthetics into a single volume. In addition, I strongly recommend Harrington’s modestly entitled ‘Introduction’ as a comprehensive and meticulous commentary on Simmel and contemporary evaluations of his oeuvre. This volume will deepen and expand our understanding of the Simmel legacy for years to come.” -- Bryan S. Turner, Australian Catholic University and the Graduate Centre CUNY"The long and detailed introduction that Harrington provides is probably one of the best introductions to Simmel's works. . . Harrington's goal of providing the reader with a complete and well-structured collection of the most important Simmel essays on art and aesthetics in just one book is fully achieved." * Simmel Studies *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Clune's A Defense of Judgment [attempts] to revivify a version of what Northrop Frye called 'literary experience' as the basis on which judgments of value can be made. His timing is propitious: the scholarly landscape is more favorable to the aesthetic than it has been in decades. . . . In a way that much academic criticism is not, [A Defense of Judgment] is refreshingly alive to the necessity of helping people learn how to appreciate works of art." -- V. Joshua Adams * Chicago Review *"We need to admit—embrace—that our role as literary critics, and educators, is to provide expert judgment; Clune argues that it’s what most of us are already doing anyway." -- Kasia Bartoszynska * Critical Inquiry * “What makes A Defense of Judgment surprising and sometimes even thrilling is how Clune relates his critique to a progressive, anti-capitalist politics.” -- Nate Klug * Commonweal *“This work should be taken seriously by anyone who thinks that criticism matters, whether it’s conducted in an online forum, a publication, or in a classroom.” -- Brice Ezell * PopMatters *"Clune’s A Defense of Judgment is a forceful polemic calling for English professors to defend themselves as experts. . . . Clune’s theory of literary appreciation does justice to the specificity of literary experience." -- Patrick Fessenbecker * Public Books *"An ambitious attempt to justify the work of judging 'value' in humanistic study. Clune’s frame of reference is specific—he writes as a scholar of literature—but his arguments have broad implications for the humanities." -- Matthew Mutter * Hedgehog Review *"Clune argues that everyone can learn how to make better artistic judgments—judgments typically based on one's own aesthetics, class, biases, education, and background. . . . Clune wants to convince the reader that making up one's mind about the worth of a play, a painting, or a book requires understanding the country in which one lives, for example, a country dived by race, class, and religion—not one nation under God, but many different peoples. Since people bring to art their own personal and collective histories, education is needed; people come from their own artistic country and thus need to learn how to see and hear well to make good judgments." * Choice *“A Defense of Judgment is a characteristically brilliant, strongly argued, intellectually accessible attempt to provide a template for rethinking the role of value judgments in teaching and writing (and thinking) about literature, and by implication the arts generally. Clune’s discussion is continually illuminating, as are the exemplary readings he offers of works by Dickinson, Brooks, and Thomas Bernhard.” * Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University *“A Defense of Judgment mounts a lucid and compelling argument for the centrality of judgment, and a polemical critique of the disciplinary pieties that assume questions of value can be bracketed off from our core business of engaging critically with texts. Clune takes on the difficult theoretical and political consequences of defending a practice of judgment grounded in expertise, in particular by developing a rigorous critique of the principle of equality.” * John Frow, University of Sydney *“Clune’s scholarship is positively entertaining. He never fails to produce surprises, particularly as he discovers connections between the question of aesthetic judgment and a constellation of seemingly far-flung topics, including neoclassical economic theories, contemporary philosophy, poetry and death, and contemporary race relations. A Defense of Judgment is remarkable for its acuity and its clarity. It takes on a question central to the future of literary studies and offers a forceful and persuasive answer, one that is likely to spark a lot of debate and almost certainly some controversy.” * Timothy Aubry, Baruch College, City University of New York *"Why study literature? What do humanities professors teach? In taking on these and other topics, A Defense of Judgment presents the clearest and most forceful account of literary studies that has yet to emerge from our moment of constant disciplinary self-reflection, justification, and reinvention. It's exhilarating to be in Clune's intellectual company. Even if you disagree (and many readers will disagree), you will find your thinking sharpened by engaging with his argument." * Genre *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1. The Theory of Judgment 1. Judgment and Equality 2. Judgment and Commercial Culture 3. Judgment and Expertise I: Attention and Incorporation 4. Judgment and Expertise II: Concepts and Criteria Part 2. The Practice of Judgment 5. How Poems Know What It’s Like to Die 6. Bernhard’s Way 7. Race Makes Class Visible Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"This unusual, potent contribution to affect studies ranges widely over philosophy and literature to explore the centrality of trope and rhetoric to the inescapable triad of mood (affect), understanding (thought), and speech (discourse). Reconnecting affect studies with major issues in literary studies, philosophy, and aesthetics, Brenkman makes a fundamental contribution to this emergent field."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University "In an earlier dark time, Kenneth Burke famously called literature 'equipment for living.' In our own moment, John Brenkman's Mood and Trope serves as a closely-reasoned and useful guide to the history of philosophies of affect and the passions. Reading texts from the Renaissance to the present with his usual clarity and precision, Brenkman shows us how literature has extended and deepened the possibilities of feeling and knowledge of feeling alike. In the end he argues that practices of poiesis and learning have played, and can continue to play, a vital role not only in the preservation of democracy, but also, as we enter an era shadowed by the prospect of extinction, in human flourishing itself." --Susan Stewart "Brenkman's Mood and Trope is a major contribution to contemporary literary studies, bringing a renewed conception of affect to bear upon poetics. Combining philosophical inquiry with brilliant interpretive readings, Brenkman not only draws out the distinctive imbrications of mood and trope across a range of modern poetic projects but also revitalizes the concept of criticism itself through a stunning reframing of Kantian aesthetic judgment in pragmatic, communicative terms."--Amanda Anderson, Brown University

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"This unusual, potent contribution to affect studies ranges widely over philosophy and literature to explore the centrality of trope and rhetoric to the inescapable triad of mood (affect), understanding (thought), and speech (discourse). Reconnecting affect studies with major issues in literary studies, philosophy, and aesthetics, Brenkman makes a fundamental contribution to this emergent field."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University "In an earlier dark time, Kenneth Burke famously called literature 'equipment for living.' In our own moment, John Brenkman's Mood and Trope serves as a closely-reasoned and useful guide to the history of philosophies of affect and the passions. Reading texts from the Renaissance to the present with his usual clarity and precision, Brenkman shows us how literature has extended and deepened the possibilities of feeling and knowledge of feeling alike. In the end he argues that practices of poiesis and learning have played, and can continue to play, a vital role not only in the preservation of democracy, but also, as we enter an era shadowed by the prospect of extinction, in human flourishing itself." --Susan Stewart "Brenkman's Mood and Trope is a major contribution to contemporary literary studies, bringing a renewed conception of affect to bear upon poetics. Combining philosophical inquiry with brilliant interpretive readings, Brenkman not only draws out the distinctive imbrications of mood and trope across a range of modern poetic projects but also revitalizes the concept of criticism itself through a stunning reframing of Kantian aesthetic judgment in pragmatic, communicative terms."--Amanda Anderson, Brown University

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Zumhagen-Yekplé’s innovative study connects a great theme of modernist literary works, that of difficulty, with Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy and the kinds of difficulty that it presents. A Different Order of Difficulty is enormously illuminating in the connections it makes between philosophical and literary questions—questions that are central in literary modernism and in Wittgenstein’s thought.” -- Cora Diamond, University of Virginia“A Different Order of Difficulty takes the very best in Wittgenstein and applies it expertly, astutely, and with impressive clarity to Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, and Coetzee. The results are both illuminating and inspiring. Instead of being mere vehicles for the transmission of ideas, modernist fictions become events, experiences, instruments of personal transformation; their opacity sets us challenges which can only be met if we change our fundamental attitude to ourselves and to the world. This is an important book, one which will, I hope, shape thinking on modernist fiction—and on Wittgenstein—for years to come.” -- Joshua Landy, Stanford University“What struck me as particularly wonderful about Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé’s new book, A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein, was how seriously it takes those promises [of intellectual expansion and the aesthetic enrichment of a daily life] and how earnestly it analyzes the contributions of literature and philosophy to what I want, without irony, to call a practical education. There are not, in fact, many books I know of that put the question of humanistic study’s usefulness quite so boldly or quite so baldly. . . . What Zumhagen-Yekplé is after here is not just an interrogation of how literature can be relevant or 'useful' but, more radically, what the idea of relevance or usefulness can be in the first place. This is why I frame her book in terms of practical education: she is helping us see that what is concretely useful about studying literature is how it expands that very category and shows us ways of finding meaning, wonder, and even transformation in what otherwise looks like opacity, mundanity, and, most broadly, difficulty.” -- John Lurz * Los Angeles Review of Books *“A Different Order of Difficulty makes an important and original contribution to modernist studies by engaging with the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus. . . . Perhaps fittingly, given her title—drawn from the Ithaca chapter of Joyce's Ulysses (1922)—Zumhagen-Yekplé's interdisciplinary approach demands a lot from readers. Yet, as in many of the modernist touchstones she analyzes, the challenges presented by her book are more than justified by the insights at which it arrives: A Different Order of Difficulty is powerfully argued, thoroughly researched, and at times deeply moving. . . . Zumhagen-Yekplé writes that 'difficult texts . . . are designed to train us by cultivating our mental and affective capacities.' A Different Order of Difficulty is itself a valuable addition to this project.” -- Greg Chase * Modernism/modernity *“Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé’s thought-provoking A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein joins a burgeoning body of scholarship on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism. A study at the boundary of literary studies and philosophy, it explores both the literary qualities of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the philosophical implications of modernist literature. . . . A Different Order of Difficulty provides a compelling and superbly argued account of the synergies between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and modernist literature, showing that the difficulty of modernism requires an imaginative engagement with literature and philosophy deeply connected with ethical transformation.” -- Michael McGillen * German Studies Review *“One of the most valuable (and thrilling) aspects of Zumhagen-Yekplé’s work is the straightforward way she grants that literary texts have implications. Her analysis of fiction is not attentive to what the texts are about, but to what they may do.” -- Johanna Winant * Comparative Literature *“Zumhagen-Yekplé discusses Wittgenstein and the ways in which he can shed new light on literary criticism as well as affinities between Wittgenstein’s writing and the writing of modernist writers. The philosophical issues are not treated separately but are considered as being interrelated in that they are concerns shared by all of the authors discussed. . . . Zumhagen-Yekplé’s book helps to show us that difficult literature and difficult philosophy can provide us with understanding, bring about shifts in our perspective, and help us to live more fully.” -- Robert Vinten * Philosophical Investigations *“There are forms of difficulty that are also clarity. I learned a lot from Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé’s A Different Order of Difficulty on this topic. She says that certain things are difficult in the sense that they’re inviting you to work through something, or to be changed by something, or to go through a process. That kind of difficulty could actually be accompanied by clarity. Here she draws on Cora Diamond. For Diamond it’s reality, not prose, that’s difficult in the first place. You might need to subject yourself to a difficult reality—try to understand it or live with it, that is—and if the prose that results from your working-through is difficult, this isn’t an affectation; it’s a consequence of the subject matter.” -- Emily OgdenTable of ContentsIntroduction Difficulty, Ethical Teaching, and the Yearning for Transformation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Modernist Literature 1 Wittgenstein’s Puzzle: The Transformative Ethics of the Tractatus 2 The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein 3 Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality 4 Wittgenstein, Joyce, and the Vanishing Problem of Life 5 A New Life Is a New Life: Teaching, Transformation, and Tautology in Coetzee’s Childhood of Jesus Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisMore than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It's the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a wave in the mind that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating. Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth c

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Based on the synesthesia between seeing and hearing, Seeing Silence is an original and fascinating meditation on the origins of human experience, art, and language. Taylor argues eloquently for the significance of silence in the contemporary world, and he shows the value of reflecting on the work of artists and thinkers who have recognized this." --Graham Parkes, University of ViennaTable of Contents0. 1. Without 2. Before 3. From 4. 5. Beyond 6. Against 7. Within 8. 9. Between 10. Toward 11. Around 12. 13. With 14. In Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot - such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial. Jean Paul Ricco argues through the medium of modern art that it is precisely such fleeting experiences that will create a queer aesthetic, and notion of ethics.Trade Review"This original and frequently dazzling work explores sites that might be defined as queer spaces, and in which we might think of a queer architecture being located. What results is an extremely fascinating effort to redefine notions of architectural space and identity, and to reimagine the spatial dimensions of subjectivity itself." - Leo Bersani, author of Homos

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Book SynopsisThere is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with soundwhether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us. ?Sound and Affectmaps a new territory forinquiryat the intersection of music, philosophy,affect theory,and sound studies.The essaysinthis volumeconsiderobjects and experiencesmarked by thecorrelation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice,as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, ormachine-made;andour sonic environments, whether natural orartificial, andhow they provoke responses in us.Farfrom being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influencedand even determinedby factors aTrade Review“Lochhead, Mendieta, and Smith have assembled a powerful compendium of theoretical and historical essays on sound and affect. This volume represents a synthesis of three rapidly growing areas of new research: affect theory, sound studies, and philosophically inflected music studies. Sound and Affect will make a significant and lasting impact in many fields. It is the type of publication that will challenge current assumptions about method and stimulate the growth of new forms of inquiry.” * Roger Mathew Grant, Wesleyan University *“‘Soundscape’ has become a common term, but most actual soundscapes remain unheard with any degree of specificity. This affecting collection helps remedy that state. It offers multiple entry points into what it regards as ‘sonic affective regimes,’ vibratory fields that impact broad swaths of eco-social life. Sound and Affect covers an astonishing range of topics, figures, and periods. One finds Plato and Ludacris, Proust and Phil Collins, Monk, Deleuze, and the Jesuit Marin Mersenne, and topics swing from desire to labor to the accented voice. Multidisciplinary in the richest sense, the book is a boon for sound studies, the philosophy of music, and musicology, and a primer for those who want to listen better and think more trenchantly about what they hear.” * John Lysaker, Emory University *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur SmithPart 1. Sounding the Political Chapter 1. Waves of Moderation: The Sound of Sophrosyne in Ancient Greek and Neoliberal Times Robin James Chapter 2. The Politics of Silence: Heidegger’s Black NotebooksAdam KnowlesPart 2. Affect, Music, Human Chapter 3. Sign, Affect, and Musicking before the Human Gary Tomlinson Chapter 4. Human Beginnings and Music: Technology and Embodiment Roles Don Ihde Chapter 5. The Life and Death of Daniel Barenboim James CurriePart 3. Voicings and Silencings Chapter 6. The Philosopher’s Voice: The Prosody of Logos Eduardo Mendieta Chapter 7. Late Capitalism, Affect, and the Algorithmic Self in Music Streaming Platforms Michael Birenbaum QuinteroPart 4. Affective Listenings Chapter 8. Music, Labor, and Technologies of Desire Martin Scherzinger Chapter 9. Musical Affect, Autobiographical Memory, and Collective Individuation in Thomas Bernhard’s CorrectionChristopher HaworthPart 5. Temporalities of Sounding Chapter 10. The “Sound” of Music: Sonic Agency and the Dialectic of Freedom and Constraint in Jazz Improvisation Lorenzo C. Simpson Chapter 11. Merleau-Ponty on Consciousness and Affect through the Temporal Movement of Music Jessica Wiskus Chapter 12. A. N. Whitehead, Feeling, and Music: On Some Potential Modifications to Affect Theory Ryan DohoneyPart 6. Theorizing the Affections Chapter 13. Delivering Affect: Mersenne, Voice, and the Background of Jesuit Rhetorical Theory André de Oliveira Redwood Chapter 14. Mimesis and the Affective Ground of Baroque Representation Daniel Villegas Vélez Chapter 15. Affect and the Recording Devices of Seventeenth-Century Italy Emily Wilbourne Chapter 16. Immanuel Kant and the Downfall of the AffektenlehreTomás McAuley Acknowledgments List of Contributors Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Lochhead, Mendieta, and Smith have assembled a powerful compendium of theoretical and historical essays on sound and affect. This volume represents a synthesis of three rapidly growing areas of new research: affect theory, sound studies, and philosophically inflected music studies. Sound and Affect will make a significant and lasting impact in many fields. It is the type of publication that will challenge current assumptions about method and stimulate the growth of new forms of inquiry.” * Roger Mathew Grant, Wesleyan University *“‘Soundscape’ has become a common term, but most actual soundscapes remain unheard with any degree of specificity. This affecting collection helps remedy that state. It offers multiple entry points into what it regards as ‘sonic affective regimes,’ vibratory fields that impact broad swaths of eco-social life. Sound and Affect covers an astonishing range of topics, figures, and periods. One finds Plato and Ludacris, Proust and Phil Collins, Monk, Deleuze, and the Jesuit Marin Mersenne, and topics swing from desire to labor to the accented voice. Multidisciplinary in the richest sense, the book is a boon for sound studies, the philosophy of music, and musicology, and a primer for those who want to listen better and think more trenchantly about what they hear.” * John Lysaker, Emory University *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur SmithPart 1. Sounding the Political Chapter 1. Waves of Moderation: The Sound of Sophrosyne in Ancient Greek and Neoliberal Times Robin James Chapter 2. The Politics of Silence: Heidegger’s Black NotebooksAdam KnowlesPart 2. Affect, Music, Human Chapter 3. Sign, Affect, and Musicking before the Human Gary Tomlinson Chapter 4. Human Beginnings and Music: Technology and Embodiment Roles Don Ihde Chapter 5. The Life and Death of Daniel Barenboim James CurriePart 3. Voicings and Silencings Chapter 6. The Philosopher’s Voice: The Prosody of Logos Eduardo Mendieta Chapter 7. Late Capitalism, Affect, and the Algorithmic Self in Music Streaming Platforms Michael Birenbaum QuinteroPart 4. Affective Listenings Chapter 8. Music, Labor, and Technologies of Desire Martin Scherzinger Chapter 9. Musical Affect, Autobiographical Memory, and Collective Individuation in Thomas Bernhard’s CorrectionChristopher HaworthPart 5. Temporalities of Sounding Chapter 10. The “Sound” of Music: Sonic Agency and the Dialectic of Freedom and Constraint in Jazz Improvisation Lorenzo C. Simpson Chapter 11. Merleau-Ponty on Consciousness and Affect through the Temporal Movement of Music Jessica Wiskus Chapter 12. A. N. Whitehead, Feeling, and Music: On Some Potential Modifications to Affect Theory Ryan DohoneyPart 6. Theorizing the Affections Chapter 13. Delivering Affect: Mersenne, Voice, and the Background of Jesuit Rhetorical Theory André de Oliveira Redwood Chapter 14. Mimesis and the Affective Ground of Baroque Representation Daniel Villegas Vélez Chapter 15. Affect and the Recording Devices of Seventeenth-Century Italy Emily Wilbourne Chapter 16. Immanuel Kant and the Downfall of the AffektenlehreTomás McAuley Acknowledgments List of Contributors Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisPoets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art. Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary artlong and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collectionsThe Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreak

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Book SynopsisRodowick takes after the theories of Hannah Arendt and argues that thinking is an art we practice with and for each other in our communities. In An Education in Judgment, philosopher D. N. Rodowick makes the definitive case for a philosophical humanistic education aimed at the cultivation of a life guided by both self-reflection and interpersonal exchange. Such a life is an education in judgment, the moral capacity to draw conclusions alone and with others, and letting one's own judgments be answerable to the potentially contrasting judgments of others. Thinking, for Rodowick, is an art we practice with and learn from each other on a daily basis. In taking this approach, Rodowick follows the lead of Hannah Arendt, who made judgment the cornerstone of her conception of community. What is important for Rodowick, as for Arendt, is the cultivation of free relations, in which we allow our judgments to be affected and transformed by those of others, creating an ever-widening fabric of intersubjective moral consideration. That is a fragile fabric, certainly, but one that Rodowick argues is worth pursuing, caring for, and preserving. This original work thinks with and beyond Arendt about the importance of the humanities and what the humanities amounts to beyond the walls of the university.Trade Review"In An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities, D.N. Rodowick draws on Hannah Arendt’s writings on judgment to make the case for a philosophy of the humanities grounded in self-reflection and interpersonal exchange. This innovative and plausible thesis of an education in judgment as the unifying element of the humanities will likely trigger fruitful debate." * LSE Review of Books *“Arendt’s reflections on judgment, thinking, moral action, and political courage show that she was not a system builder and was not interested in offering axioms by which to rearrange the world. Yet in following her train of thought, we experience the illuminating force of her insights.” * New York Review of Books *“A fresh look at Arendt’s philosophy on thinking and judgment [applied] to the current ‘crisis’ in the humanities.” * Choice *“The question of the value of education and research in the humanities is a perennial topic of academic debate . . . Few thinkers have done more to bring clarity to these debates than [Rodowick]." * The Review of Politics *"Convincing and illuminating. [Rodowick's] defense of the political importance of an education in the humanities is a beautifully written and insightful attestation to the lasting political relevance and remarkable fecundity of Hannah Arendt’s legacy." * Theory and Research in Education *"Rodowick seeks to show that Arendt’s analysis of judgment is not only a highly original but also a plausible reading of Kant, which goes against the dominant view in scholarship that Arendt committed quite a radical interpretative violence on Kant’s writings. This is not simply a question about the 'correct' interpretation of Kant but about the connections between thinking, which is an activity done in solitude and is essentially a dialogue of the 'two-in-one' within the self; judgment, which involves 'visiting' in our imagination the standpoints from which others see the world; and deliberation and action in the public sphere, which is done with others. . . . What emerges from this reading is a broader project Arendt was engaged with: the attempt to offer an alternative potential relationship between philosophy and politics." * German Studies Review *“In this elegantly crafted book, Rodowick offers a powerful defense of humanistic education. These pages resound both with Rodowick’s own voice and with the voice of his constant interlocutor, Hannah Arendt, as he works out, in spirited agreement and thoughtful disagreement with her, a philosophically rich account (which is also a model) of the conversations on which the human faculty of judgment depends.” * Patchen Markell, Cornell University *“An Education in Judgment is a challenging and substantial contribution to Arendt scholarship and a major new work of critical self-reflection on the humanities by one of the field’s leading proponents. Rodowick offers an illuminating reexamination of a cluster of texts written in the last decade of Arendt’s life, illustrating their interconnectedness, probing their difficulties, and arguing for their compelling contemporary relevance.” * Thomas Bartscherer, Bard College *“For readers familiar with now longstanding laments about the ‘crisis of the humanities’, An Education in Judgment is a breath of fresh air. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's evocative writings on aesthetics and politics, Rodowick brilliantly charts a new way forward on well-travelled terrain. The fate of the humanities lies not in shoring up what is left of the canon but in developing wholly quotidian practices of critical thinking and judging. Rooted in the ordinary capacities of all citizens, the humanities become a world-building activity that takes account of plurality and different perspectives on a common world. Recognizing with Arendt the crucial importance of publicity, this book breaks free of narrow academic debates and offers a public vision of the humanities as an imaginative space for creating a new genre of the human, not as telos but as open-ended future.” * Linda M. G. Zerilli, University of Chicago *Table of ContentsPreface I The Art of Thinking II Judgment and Culture III Culture and Curation IV The World-Observer V Politics and Philosophy, or Restoring a Common World VI An as Yet Undetermined Animal Acknowledgments Index

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Book Synopsis"Joseph Beuys", "Andy Warhol", "Yves Klein", and "Marcel Duchamp" form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. The author binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy.Trade Review"Thierry de Duve's is a crucial and utterly distinct voice in the field of modern art. Delightfully original and engaging, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx combines the author's inimitably bold thinking with an unusual sensitivity to the ways that particular works articulate the convergence of aesthetics and economics. Its gorgeously constructed essays tell this art's stories so well, they often read like the best biographical fiction." (Darby English, University of Chicago)"

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Book SynopsisThe spiritual crisis of the digital age is overload boredom. This book attends to sensation and emotion to show how our interior lives are radically reconfigured by information, stimulation, and choice overload. Sharday Mosurinjohn argues that the antidote is not withdrawal or resistance, but kedia, an ethic of care.Trade Review“Sensitively and intelligently composed, The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom advances scholarship on contemporary boredom and digital life, whilst imaginatively exploring an ethics of care through which we might create and curate meaning in an overload age. An indispensable text for understanding the present condition” Ben Anderson, Durham University

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Book SynopsisHugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through dynamic encounters with works of art.Trade Review“Clear, sensible, effective, and persuasive. Burks is exceptionally skilled in her readings of Hofmannsthal's work, pointing out specific structural and rhetorical features in the texts while simultaneously drawing on wider generalities and theoretical observations to place her sensitive and convincing close readings into a larger literary and cultural context.” Vincent Kling, La Salle University

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Book SynopsisThis imaginative new collection explores the aesthetic qualities of human relationships, sports, taste, smell, food, and natural and built environments. With essays from philosophers working in a variety of traditions in the humanities and social sciences, this collection offers an important contribution to and expansion of traditional aesthetics.Trade ReviewAndrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith have done a genuine service in assembling the essays in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. -- Theodore Gracyk Philosophy In Review "After sleepwalking for several decades under the exclusive trance of fine art, philosophers are once again recognizing that aesthetics denotes a far wider and more significant field. In the real world of everyday living, aesthetics helps determine the clothes we wear and the food we eat, but also the company, the environments, and the beliefs we keep, and even the officials we elect. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life should be welcomed as a useful and wide-ranging collection that explores this fascinating domain." -- Richard ShustermanTable of ContentsI. Theorizing the Aesthetics of the Everyday 1. The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics, by Tom Leddy 2. Ideas for a Social Aesthetic, by Arnold Berleant 3. On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place, by Arto Haapala 4. Danto and Baruchello: From Art to the Aesthetics of the Everyday, by Michael A. Principe II. Appreciating the Everyday Environment 5. Building and the Naturally Unplanned, by Pauline von Bonsdorff 6. What is the Correct Curriculum for Landscape?, by Allen Carlson 7. Wim Wenders's Everyday Aesthetics, by Andrew Light III. Finding the Everday Aesthetic 8. Sport Viewed Aesthetically, and Even as Art?, by Wolfgang Welsch 9. The Aesthetics of Weather, by Yuriko Saito 10. Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes, by Emily Brady 11. How Can Food Be Art?, by Glenn Kuehn

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Book SynopsisEnvironmental aesthetics is a field of study that focuses on nature's aesthetic value as well as on its ethical and environmental implications. This book addresses the complex relationships between aesthetic appreciation and environmental issues and emphasizes the contribution that environmental aesthetics can make to environmentalism.Trade Review[A] rich compendium if well-written, highly thoughtful articles on environmental aesthetics... Highly recommended. CHOICE Serves well as an introduction for students, graduate and undergraduate. -- Nicolas de Warren Environmental PhilosophyTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: Natural Aesthetic Value and Environmentalism by Allen Carlson and Sheila LinottPart 1 Historical Foundations (Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott) 1 - The Historical Foundations of American Environmental Attitudes (Eugene C. Hargrove) 2 - The Nature of Beauty (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 3 - Walking (Henry David Thoreau) 4 - A Near View of the High Sierra (John Muir) 5 - The Art of Seeing Things (John Burroughs) 6 - A Taste for Country: Country, Natural History, and the Conservation Esthetic (Aldo Leopold) Part 2 Nature and Aesthetic Value (Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott) 7 - Leopold's Land Aesthetic (J. Baird Callicott) 8 - Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment (Allen Carlson) 9 - Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics (Stan Godlovitch) 10 - Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms (Yuriko Saito) 11 - On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History (Noel Carroll_ 12 - Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (Patricia Matthews) Part 3 - Nature and Positive Aesthetics 13 - Nature and Positive Aesthetics (Allen Carlson ) 14 - The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature (Yuriko Saito) 15 - Aesthetics and the Value of Nature (Janna Thompson) 16 - Valuing Nature and the Autonomy of Natural Aesthetics (Stan Godlovitch) 17 - The aesthetics of Nature (Malcolm Budd) 18 - Nature Appreciation, Science and Positive Aesthetics (Glenn Parsons) Part 4: Nature Aesthetic Value, and Environmentalism 19 - From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics (Holmes Rolston III) 20 - The Beauty that Requires Health (Marcia Muelder Eaton) 21 - Cultural Sustainability: Aligning Aesthetics and Ecolog (Joan Iverson Nassauer) 22 - Toward Ecofriendly Aesthetics (Sheila Lintott) 23 - Aesthetic Character and Aesthetic Integrity in Environmental Conservation (397) 24 - Objectivity in Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment (Ned Hettinger) Sources - 439 Contributors - 441 Index - 445

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewElective Affinities is a great book. Lydia Goehr demonstrates that critical theory is not as dead or philosophically doctrinaire and petrified as many would like to believe. Instead, her study is a brilliant and persuasive intervention arguing for the significance of critical theory today, supplying the evidence that critical theory still plays a crucial role in the project of philosophy--Continental or not. -- Willi Goetschel, professor of German and philosophy, University of Toronto Elective Affinities brings the often very different (and oppositional) philosophy of the aesthetics of Danto and Adorno into a richly informative exchange, making good the case that whatever their considerable differences, there are important points of convergence, such that what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts. -- Richard Leppert, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota This book on the elective affinities of music to philosophy and drama, to birdsong and violence, to film and nationhood is imaginatively textured around two resonating themes: the persistent battle of philosophical aesthetics with history and the arts and the unusual confrontation of a European and an American aesthetic of the modern. Thinking with and through the work of Theodor Adorno and Arthur Danto, Lydia Goehr gives us a series of brilliant musical essays linked by the sustained focus on the movement of concepts such as musicality, art's relation to nature and the commonplace, the experimental, the monumental, film as visual music, and music in film. A common thread, drawn into a pattern in the final chapter, is the elective affinity between European (especially German) and American aesthetic theory and practice. -- Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University [Goehr's] analysis is erudite, lucid, and always suggestive... [Elective Affinities is] genuinely magnificent and lastingly influential. History and Theory

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewMalabou has provided a tantalizing glimpse of the ways in which philosophy at the dusk of writing must increasingly become our own way to recognize our potentials in an era of plasticity. -- Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldeberg-Hiller Theory and Event transformative -- Peter Gratton SymposiumTable of ContentsForeword, by Clayton Crockett Translator's Introduction, by Carolyn Shread Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing Afterword: Of the Impossibility of Fleeing-Plasticity Notes

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewEssential for those with a keen interest in the sociology of popular culture and stardom. Library Journal A dazzling book... that manages to pack an astonishing amount of detail and depth into a modest number of pages... Highly recommended. Choice The Star as Icon can be compared with Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, but is more contemporary and less optimistic. The book studies significant movies ( Rear Window, The Philadelphia Story), is culturally literate, and is very good on the idea of aura and popular culture as it has evolved since Walter Benjamin. Required reading for any course in film studies. -- Arthur Danto, Columbia University An eloquent essay that contributes to the contemporary discourse on celebrity and stardom. -- Leung Wing-Fai Film-PhilosophyTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. The Candle in the Wind 2. There Is Only One Star Icon (Except in a Warhol Picture) 3. Therefore Not All Idols Are American 4. A Star Is Born 5. The Film Aura: An Intermediate Case 6. Stargazing and Spying 7. Teleaesthetics 8. Diana Haunted and Hunted on TV 9. Star Aura in Consumer Society (and Other Fatalities) Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewGirgus's book offers fresh, intriguing insights. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Time, by Film 1. American Transcendence: Levinas and a Short History of an American Idea in Film 2. Frank Capra and James Stewart: Time, Transcendence, and the Other 3. The Changing Face of American Redemption: Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington 4. Sex, Art, and Oedipus: The Unbearable Lightness of Being 5. Fellini and La dolce vita: Documentary, Decadence, and Desire 6. Antonioni and L'avventura: Transcendence, the Body, and the Feminine Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewGirgus's book offers fresh, intriguing insights. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Time, by Film 1. American Transcendence: Levinas and a Short History of an American Idea in Film 2. Frank Capra and James Stewart: Time, Transcendence, and the Other 3. The Changing Face of American Redemption: Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington 4. Sex, Art, and Oedipus: The Unbearable Lightness of Being 5. Fellini and La dolce vita: Documentary, Decadence, and Desire 6. Antonioni and L'avventura: Transcendence, the Body, and the Feminine Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewGail Day's Dialectical Passions is a uniquely important book. Day argues persuasively that the powerful negations that characterize the finest Marxist thinking about art architecture to come from the postwar New Left is characterized by real--and passionate--dialectical instability. It is largely this, in her view, that prevents it from being fully subsumed by the hegemonic forms of late capitalist culture. The negations practiced by these writers, most notably T. J. Clark and Manfredo Tafuri, have been uncompromisingly realistic and resolutely non-romantic. At the same time, she argues, they share with Marx a belief, however endangered it now is, in the necessity of a genuinely radical political alternative. Day's book makes evident the value of such thinking in resisting the fixed polarities and relentless pessimism of much present-day cultural theory and its increasingly empty critiques of capitalist commodification. -- Alexander Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan A wonderfully enjoyable examination of some of the key figures, debates, and points of intrigue in art theory influenced by the New Left. -- Matthew Flisfeder PUBLICTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. T. J. Clark and the Pain of the Unattainable Beyond 2. Looking the Negative in the Face: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture 3. Absolute Dialectical Unrest, Or, the Dizziness of a Perpetually Self-Engendered Disorder 4. The Immobilization of Social Abstraction Afterword: Abstract and Transitive Possibilities Notes Index

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Book SynopsisWhat would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all?Trade ReviewThe Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. James A. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present. -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's provocative and insightful book is an original, wide-ranging, well-argued, and substantive contribution to the field that successfully conjoins theoretical debates with current historical and literary scholarship. It is, moreover, engagingly and intelligently written-a pleasure to read. -- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University Steintrager's original and persuasive study of the Marquis de Sade and the uses of Sade will be as stimulating to historians of sexuality, sex, and sexology as it will be to scholars and students of eighteenth-century French literature. The Autonomy of Pleasure will also appeal to historians of visual culture with its excellent reproductions of eighteenth-century engravings, surrealist photographs, and movie stills. -- Kate Tunstall, University of Oxford Finally, a book that commands the intelligence and the erudition to tackle the thorny topic of libertinage. Steintrager gives its due to the French Enlightenment in the radicalization of pleasure under all its guises. But his book takes us from classical antiquity all the way to the sexual revolution of the sixties. We travel from Ovid to the infamous Marquis de Sade, who makes recurring appearances, to Foucault. A resounding critical exploit on a still intriguing topic and a bold assessment of the pitfalls of the discourse of sexuality. -- Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Whose Sexual Revolution? 1. A Thousand Modes of Venery: Coital Positions as Actions and Communications 2. Voluptuary Architecture: Organizing 3. Sodomy and Reason: Making Sense of the Libertine Preference 4. "the obscene organ of brute pleasure": Social Functions of the Clitoris 5. The Fury of Her Kindness: What Should a Libertine Know About Orgasm? 6. Color and Caprice: The Politics and Aesthetics of Interracial Relations 7. Canonizing Sade: Eros, Democracy, and Differentiation Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDirect and uncompromising in his views, Rockhill sets forward a political philosophy of aesthetics, that is at once sensuous and pragmatic. The research is based on German and French works in their original articulation, and the analyses themselves take up not what is thematic but, better, what is couched in contradiction. The book will be a strong contribution to a practical-both theoretical and historical-appreciation of aesthetics and politics. -- Tom Conley, Harvard University Art feels too impossibly urgent for it not to matter to the shape of our living together; yet locating where the join between life and art is, precisely, has proved elusive. In this invaluable study, Gabriel Rockhill vanquishes the myth that either there is some privileged moment - of form, content, or effect - uniting art and politics or there is none. With subtlety and analytic rigor, Rockhill demonstrates the nexus connecting - or separating - art and politics is always bound to the dense weave of social practices located at concrete historical times in specific geographical locales. Along the way Rockhill provides a scintillating new analysis of the avant-garde, and the most acute analysis of Jacques Ranciere's aesthetic theory I have come across. Anyone interested in the question of art and politics will want to read this book. -- J. M. Bernstein. New School for Social Research Much has been written about the relationship between art and politics. "How may one reunite what was originally separated?" is a question that foregrounds a deep-seated sophism that is the cause of major misunderstandings, for art and politics have never been different entities and one understands nothing about art and politics as long as one thinks of them as self-contained. Gabriel Rockhill argues definitively against the "talisman complex" which is based on our spontaneously essentialist bias and on an ontology which always ends up sidestepping true analysis. As a radical historicist, he is not shy of complexity and chooses to reinstate art and artworks in social life, i.e., where they have meaning and depth. To isolationist theories and concepts he opposes an energetic interventionist strategy that is particularly welcome in the present field of concept formation. -- Jean-Pierre Cometti, University of Provence In this passionate and rigorous meditation on the vexed issue of the politics of art, Gabriel Rockhill examines the theses of Wittgenstein, Sartre, Adorno, Marcuse, Lukacs, Burger and Ranciere to argue that it is as wrong to "politicize aesthetics" as to "aestheticize politics." Since neither art nor politics can be founded ontologically, this lack of transcendence brings a saving grace. Understood as a historical field of collective negotiations, art recaptures its critical edge, its activist agency, and its social relevance. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania In this bold and erudite intervention into twentieth-century controversies surrounding art and politics, Rockhill dissolves a whole series of reifications, essentialisms, and other symptoms of magical thinking in a bath of 'radical historicism.' Art and politics emerge as no longer clearly defined entities but as a host of artistic and political practices, intertwined and interacting in an everchanging, ever-contested constellation of encounters and relations. -- Kristin Ross, New York University We are living in a period when in many fields of humanities history is taken for granted more often than it is taken seriously. Radical History and the Politics of Art thoroughly challenges this attitude by demonstrating the subversive explanatory power of historical analysis. By considering art and politics as entirely immanent in sociohistorical practices, Rockhill argues for their multiform relationship as displayed in various temporal, geographical, and social configurations. Thus, he integrates the disciplinary priorities of a theoretician of art into a style of discourse that offers a powerful philosophical way of reading history. Radical History and the Politics of Art is elegantly written, informative, and never less than provocative. The result is a radical voice long unheard in the field of theoretical discourse on art. -- Adam Takacs, Eotvos Lorand University Budapest Rockhill's book is a polemic against the various theoretical presuppositions and postures, which fatally misconstrue the relevant factors for assessing the actual agency of aesthetic practices. It is also an assertive defence of the 'politicity' of these practices... [His] book is important because it gives exemplary attention to the factors that a competent approach to this area needs to consider. More than this, Rockhill shows that obscurity is the appropriate fate for undisciplined conceptual speculation. Notre Dame Philosophical Review One welcomes [an] ambitious, iconoclastic work like Gabriel Rockhill's Radical History and the Politics of Art. Radical Philosophy Rockhill's ambitious and erudite Radical History and the Politics of Art covers a sizable and variegated terrain. -- Pavel Lembersky H-Socialisms An engagingly written book that is full of insight, and which judiciously and forcefully combines readings of some of the most cited critics on art and politics in the twentieth century. As such, it makes a new, demanding inquiry into the appropriate methodology for rethinking politicized aesthetic practices. -- Sophie Seita Modernism/modernityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Art and Politics in the Time of Radical History Part I. Historical Encounters Between Art and Politics 1. For a Radical Historicist Analytic of Aesthetic and Political Practices 2. Realism, Formalism, Commitment: Three Historic Positions on Art and Politics Part II. Visions of the Avant-Garde 3. The Theoretical Destiny of the Avant-Garde 4. Toward a Reconsideration of Avant-Garde Practices Part III. The Politics of Aesthetics 5. The Silent Revolution: Ranciere's Rethinking of Aesthetics and Politics 6. Productive Contradictions: From Ranciere's Politics of Aesthetics to the Social Politicity of the Arts Part IV. The Social Politicity of Aesthetic Practices 7. The Politicity of 'Apolitical' Art: A Pragmatic Intervention Into the Art of the Cold War 8. Rethinking the Politics of Aesthetic Practices: Advancing the Critique of the Ontological Illusion and the Talisman Complex Conclusion: Radical Art and Politics-No End in Sight Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewRosalyn Deutsche argues for a certain modesty-or perhaps, I should say, a modest uncertainty-with regard to the demands placed upon art in response to war. She brings a deep knowledge of both contemporary art and the psychoanalytic literature on war to her study, as well as the careful exposition and lucid prose we've come to expect from her work. -- Douglas Crimp, author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer PoliticsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Silvia Kolbowski 2. Leslie Thornton 3. Krzysztof Wodiczko Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewRosalyn Deutsche argues for a certain modesty-or perhaps, I should say, a modest uncertainty-with regard to the demands placed upon art in response to war. She brings a deep knowledge of both contemporary art and the psychoanalytic literature on war to her study, as well as the careful exposition and lucid prose we've come to expect from her work. -- Douglas Crimp, author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer PoliticsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Silvia Kolbowski 2. Leslie Thornton 3. Krzysztof Wodiczko Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCrafting a philosophy of cinematic art from the keenest insights of the continental and analytic traditions.Trade ReviewA half-century after Jean Mitry's magisterial integration of classical film theory, Daniel Yacavone has done the same for its modern counterpart, managing not just to reconcile, but to recruit the extremes of cognitivism and of phenomenology for his prodigious satellite mapping of the terrae incognitae he rightly calls 'Film Worlds.' Without hyperbole or histrionics, Yacavone delivers a stable and progressive suite of concepts that address films as texts and embodied affect. He has culled these from a balanced review of an impressive roster of film theorists and the twentieth-century thinkers they have drawn on, some of whom have been waiting in the wings to contribute to a compelling vision like Yacavone's. That vision not only illuminates how films work but also how they work on us, and even work for us. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University A major reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic experience through the medium of cinema. It offers new insights into the hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikel Dufrenne, as well as Nelson Goodman's concept of world-making. It also presents a significant revision of our understanding of modern and contemporary film theory from Mitry and Metz to Bordwell and Deleuze. This brilliant and original work will be of interest to philosophers and film scholars alike. -- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago Yacavone articulates an approach to cinema that incorporates elements of various tendencies in current film theory-including, chiefly, those of a broadly sociocultural bent, those focused on empirical studies and cognitive science, and those stressing the phenomenological dimension of spectatorship-and to unite them via the concept of cinematic 'worlds.' His command of the theoretical literature is impressive, and his references to analytic and continental philosophy and film theory are wide-ranging and inclusive of most of the approaches adopted over the last century. -- Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia Film Worlds is a synthetic and holistic work, one that seeks to include rather than exclude as many philosophies of film as possible. Yacavone's "aesthetics of cinema" turns out to be a rather wide tent, and almost anybody working at the intersection of film and philosophy can find shelter beneath it somewhere. Los Angeles Review of Books [A] notable tour de force across centuries of reflections on the transformative powers of cinematic aesthetics. -- Steffen Hven New Review of Film and Television StudiesTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Films and Worlds 1. Worlds Within Worlds: Fictions, Narrative, and Aesthetic Enclosure Part II. Worlds of Symbols 2. The Framework of Worlds: Symbolization, Meaning, and Art 3. Filmmaking as Symbolic Transformation 4. Ways of Cinematic World-Making 5. Representation, Exemplification, and Reflexivity: An Alternative Approach to the Symbolic Dimension of Cinematic Art Part III. Worlds of Feeling 6. Forms of Feeling: Mapping Affect and Emotions in Films 7. Cineaesthetic World-Feeling and Immersion Part IV. Worlds of Truth 8. Toward an Existential Hermeneutics of Film Worlds Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCrafting a philosophy of cinematic art from the keenest insights of the continental and analytic traditions.Trade ReviewA half-century after Jean Mitry's magisterial integration of classical film theory, Daniel Yacavone has done the same for its modern counterpart, managing not just to reconcile, but to recruit the extremes of cognitivism and of phenomenology for his prodigious satellite mapping of the terrae incognitae he rightly calls 'Film Worlds.' Without hyperbole or histrionics, Yacavone delivers a stable and progressive suite of concepts that address films as texts and embodied affect. He has culled these from a balanced review of an impressive roster of film theorists and the twentieth-century thinkers they have drawn on, some of whom have been waiting in the wings to contribute to a compelling vision like Yacavone's. That vision not only illuminates how films work but also how they work on us, and even work for us. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University A major reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic experience through the medium of cinema. It offers new insights into the hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikel Dufrenne, as well as Nelson Goodman's concept of world-making. It also presents a significant revision of our understanding of modern and contemporary film theory from Mitry and Metz to Bordwell and Deleuze. This brilliant and original work will be of interest to philosophers and film scholars alike. -- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago Yacavone articulates an approach to cinema that incorporates elements of various tendencies in current film theory-including, chiefly, those of a broadly sociocultural bent, those focused on empirical studies and cognitive science, and those stressing the phenomenological dimension of spectatorship-and to unite them via the concept of cinematic 'worlds.' His command of the theoretical literature is impressive, and his references to analytic and continental philosophy and film theory are wide-ranging and inclusive of most of the approaches adopted over the last century. -- Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia Film Worlds is a synthetic and holistic work, one that seeks to include rather than exclude as many philosophies of film as possible. Yacavone's "aesthetics of cinema" turns out to be a rather wide tent, and almost anybody working at the intersection of film and philosophy can find shelter beneath it somewhere. Los Angeles Review of Books [A] notable tour de force across centuries of reflections on the transformative powers of cinematic aesthetics. -- Steffen Hven New Review of Film and Television StudiesTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Films and Worlds 1. Worlds Within Worlds: Fictions, Narrative, and Aesthetic Enclosure Part II. Worlds of Symbols 2. The Framework of Worlds: Symbolization, Meaning, and Art 3. Filmmaking as Symbolic Transformation 4. Ways of Cinematic World-Making 5. Representation, Exemplification, and Reflexivity: An Alternative Approach to the Symbolic Dimension of Cinematic Art Part III. Worlds of Feeling 6. Forms of Feeling: Mapping Affect and Emotions in Films 7. Cineaesthetic World-Feeling and Immersion Part IV. Worlds of Truth 8. Toward an Existential Hermeneutics of Film Worlds Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn internationally acclaimed theorist examines the consequences of our changing relationship to time and space.Trade ReviewIn Our Broad Present, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of our most insightful and influential literary and cultural theorists, has distilled from the extraordinary breadth of literary, historical, cultural, and philosophical interventions that has defined his work for the last three decades a pointed and poignant diagnosis of our contemporary ethos. As those who are familiar with his oeuvre know, Gumbrecht's distaste for the humanistic insistence on interpretation, language, and meaning and his preference for the material dimension of culture led him to embrace, with his characteristic pleasure in shirking academic trends, a term that had become almost unmentionable in the years following the ascendency of deconstruction: presence. In Our Broad Present, he puts this concept to use in trenchantly analyzing-in his now recognizable style meshing autobiography, anecdote, and at times auto-ironic musings-the gains and losses of living in a hyper-mediated world in which presence has become all the more valuable to the extent that we are losing it. -- William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University Drawing on a literary lifework of astonishing breadth, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has, in Our Broad Present, put the bodily, physical presence of things and people front and center-against the perpetual drive to "go beyond" that which is right here, just in front of us. Not for him: meaning that vectors elsewhere, simulations that purport to borrow from an unreachable future, abstractions that eviscerate the corporeal. Instead, Gumbrecht wants a metaphysics, and more importantly for him, an aesthetics of insistent, stubborn, here and now-ness. Whether he is looking at sports in an age of classical gods or at a physicality that will not evaporate into language alone, Gumbrecht gives us a glimpse at the world without running from it. Our Broad Present is a spirited engagement with things in relations to embodied life by an original and independent thinker. -- Peter Galison, Harvard University Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's latest book offers a startling assessment of present-day cultural globalization, its seduction and its dangers. It shows how our immediate access to every spatial and temporal aspect of world culture, while freeing us from the weight of history, divests our life from its concrete, palpable richness. A splendid essay by one of the liveliest contemporary thinkers, Our Broad Present is a must read for all those who care about the future of culture. -- Thomas G. Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Gumbrecht's writing crackles with ideas. In this collection of essays, he continues his explorations of "presence" and looks at everything from classical literature to globalization, spectator sports to hypercommunication, each time with an exacting insight and engaging style all his own. The focus here is on the temporal aspects of presence as lived today. Gumbrecht sees the profound in the everyday; his descriptions of our shared experiences bring these to light as though for the first time. The essays assembled here provide a kaleidoscopic look into our "broad present," as Gumbrecht terms it, and teach us much about the times, and time, in which we live. -- Andrew Mitchell, Emory University Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the most imaginative and innovative critic to have emerged from the German philological tradition since the great generation of Auerbach and Spitzer. His brilliant books have expanded our concept of critical inquiry. Theoretical virtuosity, staggering breadth of learning, and sustained engagement with the texture and aliveness of cultural artifacts and practices characterize his work throughout. But Gumbrecht's intellectual signature is recognizable above all in two features: keen diagnostic sensitivity and the courage of unprotected, first-personal judgment. Both are amply in evidence in Our Broad Present. -- David Wellbery, University of Chicago This is an original contribution not only for its philosophical insights, but also for the cultural analysis of our time. -- Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona Our Broad Present is a timely and crucial contribution to the on-going debate in the humanities about the effects of globalization upon contemporary Western culture. It unfolds a rich and colorful tapestry of the emerging cultural practices that increasingly define our social communities and individual human behavior. It is a marvelous book full of original ideas by one of the most important thinkers in the humanities today. -- Carsten Strathausen, University of Missouri This brief, provocative, and at times entertaining work should interest any serious student of literature, philosophy, or modern culture.Library Journal Library JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Tracking a Hypothesis 1. Presence in Language or Presence Achieved Against Language? 2. A Negative Anthropology of Globalization 3. Stagnation: Temporal, Intellectual, Heavenly 4. "Lost in Focused Intensity": Spectator Sports and Strategies of Re-Enchantment 5. Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present: On Our New Relationship with Classics 6. Infinite Availability: About Hyper-Communication (and Old Age) In the Broad Present Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA sweeping historical and intellectual genealogy of our struggle to represent disorder from the classical period to the twentieth century.Trade ReviewMeisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, and Stoppard are matched by equally detailed and thoughtful considerations of graphics by Otto Dix, the landscapes of Turner, War and Peace, Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and Haydn's Creation. -- Ross Hamilton, Barnard College Meisel's magnum opus is a heroic act of defiance against its own subject matter: an enlightening, judicious, cohesive history of three millennia of thought about the terrors and attractions of chaos. The book moves with steady confidence through literature, science, art, and philosophy, illuminating many varieties of darkness and finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, Meisel creates a whole new field of study. -- Edward Mendelson, Columbia University This extraordinary, encyclopedic exploration of how artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists have imagined and represented chaos explores not chaos in the abstract but those crucial transitions to (and from) chaos that are so intricately represented in the most complex artworks. The unpredictable is then made not predictable but endlessly fascinating. Martin Meisel's is a bravura performance, one of those rare critical studies not for one but for all seasons. -- Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University This exhilarating masterpiece can only have emerged from a mind steeped in physics as an undergraduate and theater as a graduate student, followed by the broadest explorations in a lifetime of scholarship. The world may have emerged from the quantum 'chaos' of the Big Bang, but Meisel has ordered everything since beautifully. -- David Helfand, author of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age [An] ambitious multidisciplinary work. Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations OMEGA. Uncertainty and Complexity: An Untethered Epilogue After Entropy Incompleteness and Incongruity The Message of the Quantum Lost Horizons Chaos Everywhere Looking Askance Chaosmos 1. Shaping Chaos 2. Nothing and Something Something out of Nothing? Nothing in Something "The Nurse of Becoming" Saying Nothing Nothing as Nothing The Middle of Nowhere Positive Negation 3. Number: The One and the Many Division and Multiplication Sophocles' Thought Experiment Imagining the Worst Taking the Measure One World or Many? "Number-Worlds" A Glance Into the Abyss Truth and Poetry Sightlines Everything by One and One 4. Carnival Monstrous Confusion Going to the Fair Dreamworks Lords of Misrule Parody Refram'd The Wild God 5. War Representation Conscripting War Emblematics Condition Soldiers and Peasants: Callot Goya's Nightmare Dix and the Chaos Within Consummation Managing the Chaos The Fog of Battle Armageddon and Apocalypse 6. Energy Matter in Motion (Inertia, Friction, Noise) Statics and Dynamics The Homeostatic Universe Friction and Noise Nebular Hypotheses Energy Unbound Wirrwarr Petrific Chaos Energy's Epic Energy's Image Postlude: Energy's Acolytes 7. Entropy Time and Tide Conservation and Convertibility Double-Entry Physics The Death of the Universe Ancestral Voices A Question of Time A Sense of Direction Second Thoughts Tristes Entropics Nature Decay'd Chekhov's Fiddle Entartung Zola's Fevers Vox clamantis Anarchy and Endgame Resistance and Complementarity Beckett and the Shape of Chaos Sights and Sounds 8. Coda, or Da capo al fine Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDeftly moving through Julia Kristeva's entire body of work, Elaine P. Miller brilliantly stages engagements between Kristeva's thought and that of Adorno, Arendt, Augustine, Benjamin, Freud, Green, Hegel, Kant, Klein, Lacan, and Proust, among others. Her analysis also sheds light on some of Kristeva's most intractable concepts, including negativity, the uncanny, time, the semiotic, mimesis, art, and the aesthetic. Head Cases is filled with keen insights, rigorous scholarship, and beautiful prose. -- Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University By drawing on both the history of philosophical aesthetics and psychoanalysis, Head Cases makes an important contribution to contemporary aesthetic theory and Julia Kristeva studies. As a Kristeva scholar who is also interested in aesthetics, I am very pleased to say that this is simply the best book combining both of these fields. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Head Cases is a wonderfully engaging work-lucid, subtle, and invigorating. It will be indispensable for all readers of Kristeva and for anyone preoccupied with the concept of melancholia as a psychological, political, and aesthetic category. -- Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto Ambitious and widely-read... French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Losing our Heads 1. Kristeva and Benjamin: Melancholy and the Allegorical Imagination 2. Kenotic Art: Negativity, Iconoclasm, Inscription 3. To Be and Remain Foreign: Tarrying with L'Inquietante Etrangete Alongside Arendt and Kafka 4. Sublimating Maman: Experience, Time, and the Re-erotization of Existence in Kristeva's Reading of Marcel Proust 5. The "Orestes Complex": Thinking Hatred, Forgiveness, Greek Tragedy, and the Cinema of the "Thought Specular" with Hegel, Freud, and Klein Conclusion: Forging a Head Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisConstructs an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher’s fragmentary writings on art and perception.Trade ReviewCecilia Sjoholm provides an original and provocative reinterpretation of the difficult and controversial philosophical issues in Hannah Arendt's studies, such as embodiment, realness, appearance, judgment, and the role of sense experience. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt is written with admirable clarity, elegance, and a sense of its own unique voice. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism In addition to filling a significant hole in existing scholarship, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt performs a powerful double gesture with far-reaching consequences. The double entendre of the title means both cultivating an account of aesthetics in which there appeared to be none and, perhaps more fundamentally, transforming the aesthetic apertures that pre-conceptually determine how a body of work appears. Cecilia Sjoholm has truly done what appeared impossible by doing aesthetics with Arendt. -- Gabriel Rockhill, author of Radical History and the Politics of Art With its insistent references to the spaces of appearances and new beginnings, to judgment and narrative, and to perspectives and plurality, Hannah Arendt's philosophy is thoroughly and emphatically structured by aesthetic categories, which no reader could have failed to notice. Bringing these categories-and some new ones: the sense of 'realness' and the 'sounding' of the language of love-into orderly, pointed, and illuminating focus, Cecilia Sjoholm has compellingly and beautifully constructed for us Arendt's unwritten aesthetics. By allowing Arendt's aesthetic doctrine to so perspicuously come into view, Sjoholm has placed us all in her debt. -- J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social ResearchTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sensing Space: Art and the Public Sphere 2. The Work of Art 3. The Encroachment of Others 4. Tensions of Law: Tragedy and the Visibility of Lives 5. Comedy in the Dark: Arendt, Chaplin, and Anti-Semitism Notes Bibliography Index

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