Philosophy: aesthetics Books
Spring Publications The Genius Decision
Book Synopsis
£19.80
Urbanomic Media Ltd Secrets of Creation Urbanomic Redactions
Book SynopsisAn artist and a mathematician debate, find common ground, and jointly create an assemblage that is neither (or both) an artwork and a mathematical model.A week-long residency project brought together artist Conrad Shawcross and mathematician Matthew Watkins to reflect on the ways in which artists use (or misuse) scientific and mathematical concepts. Secrets of Creation documents this fascinating meeting of worlds, presenting both the week's discussions and debates, and the project upon which Shawcross and Watkins subsequently embarked.Navigating a route that tacked between formalism and natural language, experts and laymen, quantity and quality, poetics and mechanics, Shawcross and Watkins gradually forged a shared discourse in which the concerns of the artist and those of the mathematician could find a common ground. The project ended with their joint creation of an assemblage that was neither (or both) an artwork and a mathematical model.
£12.59
Green Writers Press Infinite Good
Book Synopsis
£16.16
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Mirrors to One Another
Book SynopsisA compelling exploration of the convergence of Jane Austen's literary themes and characters with David Hume's views on morality and human nature. Argues that the normative perspectives endorsed in Jane Austen''s novels are best characterized in terms of a Humean approach, and that the merits of Hume''s account of ethical, aesthetic and epistemic virtue are vividly illustrated by Austen''s writing. Illustrates how Hume and Austen complement one another, each providing a lens that allows us to expand and elaborate on the ideas of the other Proposes that literature may serve as a thought experiment, articulating hypothetical cases which allow the reader to test her moral intuitions Contributes to ongoing debates on the philosophy of literature, ethics, and emotion Trade Review"Dadlez unpacks the major philosophical trends evident in both Austen and Hume to show that Austen's works were influenced by the intellectual climate resulting from Hume's studies." (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, December 2009) "Dadlez says explicitly that her argument is intended to be cumulative: that is, the text reveals the posited relationship between Hume and Austen gradually, through a series of smaller demonstrations as she moves from topic to topic. This makes her book an extremely pleasant read for an Austen aficionado.... Indeed, that the book's strength lies in the details... suggests that it will be of particular value in interdisciplinary contexts: it has the double function of introducing Austen and her literature to philosophers, and Hume and his moral philosophy to students of literature." (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 2010)Table of ContentsPreface. 1. How Literature Can Be a Thought Experiment: Alternatives to and Elaborations of Original Accounts. 2. Literary Form and Philosophical Content. 3. Kantian and Artistotelian Accounts of Austen. 4. Hume and Austen on Pleasure, Sentiment, and Virtue. 5. Hume and Austen on Sympathy. 6. Hume's General Point of View and the Novels of Jane Austen. 7. The Useful and the Good in Hume and Austen. 8. Aesthetics and Humean Aesthetic Norms in the Novels of Jane Austen. 9. Hume and Austen on Good People and Good Reasoning. 10. ‘Lovers,' ‘Friends,' and other Endearing Appellations. 11. Hume and Austen on Pride. 12. Hume and Austen on Jealousy, Envy, Malice and the Principle of Comparison. 13. Indolence and Industry in Hume and Austen. 14. What Hume’s Philosophy Contributes to Our Understanding of Austen’s Fiction; What Austen’s Fiction Contributes to Our Understanding of Hume’s Philosophy
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Disparities
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA book of profound philosophical investigation. * David Marx Book Reviews *Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: IS HEGEL DEAD — OR ARE WE DEAD (IN THE EYES OF HEGEL)? When the Kraken Wakes A Report from the Trenches of Dialectical Materialism I THE DISPARITY OF TRUTH: SUBJECT, OBJECT, AND THE REST 1. FROM HUMAN TO POSTHUMAN AND BACK TO INHUMAN: THE PERSISTENCE OF ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE Aspects of Disparity Against the Univocity of Being Posthuman, Transhuman, Inhuman Hyperobjects in the Age of Anthropocene Biology or Quantum Physics? 2. OBJECTS, OBJECTS AND THE SUBJECT Re-enchanting Nature? No, Thanks! A Detour: Ideology in Pluriverse On a Subject Which Is Not an Object Resistance, Stasis, Repetition Speculative Judgment The Subject’s Epigenesis 3. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, WHICH SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS? AGAINST THE RENORMALIZATION OF HEGEL In Defense of Hegel’s Madness The Immediacy of Mediation The Stick in Itself, for Us, for Itself Action and Responsibility Recollection, Forgiveness, Reconciliation Healing the Wound Self-consciousness = Freedom = Reason Reflexivity of the Unconscious II THE DISPARITY OF BEAUTY: THE UGLY, THE ABJECT, AND THE MINIMAL DIFFERENCE 4. ART AFTER HEGEL, HEGEL AFTER THE END OF ART With Hegel Against Hegel The Ugly Gaze From the Sublime to the Monstrous Hegel’s Path towards the Nonfigurative Between Auschwitz and Telenovelas 5. VERSIONS OF ABJECT: UGLY, CREEPY, DISGUSTING Varieties of Disavowal Traversing Abjection “MOOR EEFFOC” From Abjective to Creepy Mamatschi! Eisler’s Sinthoms 6. WHEN NOTHING CHANGES: TWO SCENES OF SUBJECTIVE DESTITUTION The Lesson of Psychoanalysis Music as a Sign of Love A Failed Betrayal Scene from a Happy Life III THE DISPARITY OF THE GOOD: TOWARDS A MATERIALIST NEGATIVE THEOLOGY 7. TRIBULATIONS OF A WOMAN-HYENA: AUTHORITY, COSTUME, AND FRIENDSHIP Why Heidegger Should Not Be Criminalized The Birth of Fascism out of the Spirit of Beauty Don Carlos between Auhthority and Friendship Stalin as Anti-Master Schiller versus Hegel The Self-Debased Authority 8. IS GOD DEAD, UNCONSCIOUS, EVIL, IMPOTENT, STUPID OR JUST COUNTERFACTUAL? On Divine Inexistence Counterfactuals Retroactivity, Omnipotence, and Impotence The Twelfth Camel as One of the Names of God A Truth That Arises out of a Lie The Divine Death-Drive The Deposed God 9. JECT OR SCEND? FROM THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT TO SUBJECT AS TRAUMA The Parallax of Drive and Desire Immortality as Death in Life The Troubles with Finitude Materialism or Agnosticism? A Comical Conclusion CONCLUSION: THE COURAGE OF HOPELESSNESS The Millenarian “Exhalation of Stale Gas” Divine Violence The Points of the Impossible Index
£36.00
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Questionnaire
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of the form as form, from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers. * Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016); Contributor, The New Yorker; Associate Professor of English, Vassar College, USA *Evan Kindley's crisp and fleet Questionnaire travels with extraordinary speed from the quaint and idle to the flat-out alarming, with huge implications for our digital culture now and in the future. * Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris *Be vigilant, friend, for we live in the age of the BuzzFeed Quiz. … Beneath every expression of preference is a rat’s nest of prejudices, insecurities, and empty assertions of selfhood. Fortunately, there’s Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire, one in a new crop from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—it offers a rich primer on humankind’s submission to inane paperwork. In the questionnaire, Kindley demonstrates, bureaucrats found a ridiculously simple solution to a long-standing problem: How do you get people to open up about themselves to total strangers? Turns out that just asking, ideally with some veneer of officialdom, is a great way to start. As Kindley writes in his introduction, ‘The decision to provide information about oneself, as irresistible as it sometimes seems, is neither a natural human instinct nor an automatic social good’; it takes a finely tuned questionnaire to coax us out of our shells, and there are dubious intentions behind just about every form. Eugenics, managerial power-plays, electoral politics, Christian matchmaking, latent fascism, female desire—you name it, some questionnaire has interrogated it. Kindley’s book provides a lucid, distressing look at the backbone of demography. -- Dan Piepenbring * The Paris Review *The story of Francis Galton begins the story of Questionnaire, Evan Kindley’s new entry into 'Object Lessons,' a series from Bloomsbury 'about the hidden lives of ordinary things.' … Kindley’s approach keeps with the spirit and method of the series, tracking the evolution of this particular thing—in this case, standardized sets of questions designed to elicit self-report, and the question of whether or not self-reported answers, no matter how well-designed, no matter how robust their sample, can ever be entirely honest or accurate—over the history of its existence. … Kindley does an admirable job of presenting that history, especially given that Object Lesson entries are, as a rule, very short. … [T]he pervasive, vaguely Orwellian character of Big Data is among is the first world’s most pronounced animating anxieties. It is a worry I share, but in reading Questionnaire, I was put in mind of another—not explicitly named, but more remarkable and more troubling: the possibility, already somewhat realized, of a world where the collection of facts is not a means to some nefarious end, but the empty end itself. -- Emmett Rensin * Bookforum *People with a paranoid streak will feel vindicated by Evan Kindley's Questionnaire, a thoughtful exploration of the subject from the Proust questionnaire through Buzzfeed quizzes. As Kindley documents, nearly everyone who puts a quiz in front of you is trying to mine something from you, often (though not always) for profit or to influence your behavior ... Kindley's final chapters on computer dating questionnaires and Buzzfeed quizzes illustrate how powerful and potentially dangerous data science has become, even when personal responses are anonymized. * Milwaukee Journal Sentinel *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Form as Form 1. Private Publicity 2. The Rise and Fall of Testing 3. Your Opinion of You 4. The Art of Asking 5. Pandora’s Checklist 6. Dating and Data 7. Quiz Mania Acknowledgments Endnotes Index
£12.11
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Whale Song
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The sapiens of the sea, whales are the other intelligent, social, and loquacious animal. But they seem to swim away the more people chase after them in an effort to communicate and connect. Why does the meaning of their mesmerizing songs continue to elude us? In times of unprecedented environmental and social loss, Whale Song ponders the problems facing ocean ecosystems and offers lessons from those depths for human social life and intimacy. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewEnchanting … Beautifully written and often deeply moving, Whale Song is more than a fascinating examination of ocean life - it's a balm for the soul … This slim but enthralling work of nonfiction explores what whale song has meant to humans since our first recording of it. * Shelf Awareness *Writing with the clarity and precision of a dolphin’s clicks, Grebowicz covers the history of the sometimes-futile attempts by humans to communicate with whales, dolphins, and other ocean dwellers. Humans could learn much from the dispassionate language of these creatures, whose sonar and other forms of long-range sonic communication is, by necessity, without deceit. * Alvin Lucier, Composer *Whale Song is just the music of the earth we need now. Margret Grebowicz is listening to our Terran cousins in the rising storm. * Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene *Table of Contents1. Songs 2. Loneliness 3. Language 4. Interest 5. Charisma 6. Captivity 7. Noise 8. Waste 9. Music 10. Kissing Acknowledgments Notes Index
£9.49
University of Minnesota Press Foucault on Painting
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
£28.73
University of Minnesota Press Superhumanity: Design of the Self
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
£100.00
University of Minnesota Press Art and Cosmotechnics
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
£95.00
Cambridge Scholars Publishing Reflections on Poetry and the World: Walking
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together 40 years of essays about poetry and literature written by Emily Grosholz. The first section includes essays about some of her favorite poets and thinkers in the United States, England, France and Germany. The second section brings poetry into relation with ethics, politics and practical deliberation, and the third considers it alongside science and imagination. The last section is an homage to The Hudson Review, for whom she has served as an Advisory Editor for many years. As a philosopher, Emily Grosholz has written and thought about feminism, racism, and mathematics and science, which has led her to admire all the more the distinct wisdom of poetry. These essays show how poetry reorganized language and memory, eros and experience, and time and place, and how and why it deepens our understanding of life.Trade Review“Since meeting her, I have been dazzled by the combination of poetry, philosophy and mathematics in Emily Grosholz’s thought and writing, particularly in her poems. And those poems are not stiff academic exercises, but true poetry.”Ruth FainlightPoet“Emily Grosholz’s essays are like being in your best friend’s open touring car with a hamper in the back. And the landscape is the most interesting people of our age. We see each mind-landscape in her mellow Mediterranean light of insight, accepting, registering, presenting, pointing so well that explanation is hardly needed. This is Grosholz’s middle way—or as she would say, middle term—between the dazzling inhuman light of her philosophy of science and the intimate glow of her poetry. It’s the vision of a sane, good human being with a mammoth intellect and a half-hidden puckish sense of humor.”Frederick TurnerPoet“This collection is a magnificent testament to Emily Grosholz’s range and depth. She moves effortlessly across disciplines, from mathematics and science, to literature and social issues, sweeping up an extraordinary chorus of thinkers, and illuminating all she touches with lucidity, erudition, and grace.”Philip KitcherPhilosopher and poet
£52.07
Exile Editions Hoggwash: The Rosenblatt / Callaghan Epistolary
Book SynopsisBarry Callaghan and Joe Rosenblatt, poets of perspicacity, pizzazz, and probity, have been combative, ecstatic compadres for over 40 years, with Callaghan donning an array of chapeaus, the man of belles lettres and hog flaneur-on-the-hoof from Smooth City, while Rosenblatt decades ago declared his unconditional allegiance to the buzzzers, chirpers, and purrers of the natural world, to remain at peace by his pond, aloof from the human horde. This most unlikely pair are conjoined by their shared dedication to the Word, to those rare moments of ascendent insight that are contained in bedrock language, to disputation about all matters of gravity and gullibility, and to the sharing of extraordinary paintings and ink drawings come from their nether surreal and noumenal worlds. Hoggwash, a convergence by epistle, is a tribute not just to their enduring friendship but to the life of the imagination itself. There is no record of correspondence like this, anywhere in the world.Trade ReviewIf there is one writer I want to read anywhere and always, it is Barry Callaghan. Callaghan talking with Joe Rosenblatt can only be an incredible bonus." —Joe Fiorito, Toronto Star"Callaghan and Rosenblatt have taken two decades of letters, poems, and drawings and composed one of the most engaging exchanges ever shared." —Leon Rooke
£16.16
MIT Press Ltd The Aesthetics of Disappearance
Book SynopsisVirilio introduces his understanding of "picnolepsy"—the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed.Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception—a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural—and still consummate—theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy"—the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed. "I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove''s attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio''s follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture. Foreign Agents seriesDistributed for Semiotext(e)
£999.99
Autonomedia The Ordinary Man of Cinema
Book Synopsis
£15.29
St Augustine's Press Romancing Reality – Homa Viator & Scandal Called
Book SynopsisThe concern in this essay is for our age as one suffering an intellectual severance between our response to existential reality in which the beauty of a created particular thing is divorced from the Cause of that thing's existence. The separation speaks of a deracination of homo viator - the person on his way. It is a consequence of what may be called the Modernist Ideology of the Self, by which the ideological reduction of reality usurps the mystery of soul into the concept of self. This severance of beauty from Beauty, implying the general dislocation of homo viator, is seen as the separation of grace from nature. Montgomery considers Tolstoy as representative of the Modernist man, confused by an intellectual climate that isolates the person from the self. Tolstoy, in is romancing of reality, becomes so burdened by his sense of guilt in being seduced into the scandal of beauty that he is almost overwhelmed by despair. This compared with Friedrich Schiller, whose romanticism encompasses not only the romanticism of the West but also the East, adopts Kant's philosophy to justify feeling, not as Tolstoy would (elevating it at the expense of reason), but by intensifying a severe reason as a gnostic ploy to gain power over feeling. Against these two, Montgomery casts St. Thomas as the one who would restore the givenness of reality and provide an authentic vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful, to recover an ordinate and vital intent governing homo viator in his quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.Table of ContentsFriedrich Schiller as Kantian romantic -- On reading Tolstoy's What is art? -- Seeing the country of reality -- Beauty, that which when seen pleases.
£24.00
St Augustine's Press The Silence of Goethe
Book SynopsisDuring the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.The richness of this life revealing itself over a period of more than sixty years appeared before my gaze in its truly overpowering magnificence, which almost shattered my powers of comprehension – confined, as they had been, to the most immediate and pressing concerns. What a passionate focus on reality in all its forms, what an undying quest to chase down all that is in the world, what strength to affirm life, what ability to take part in it, what vehemence in the way he showed his dedication to it! Of course, too, what ability to limit himself to what was appropriate; what firm control in inhibiting what was purely aimless; what religious respect for the truth of being! I could not overcome my astonishment; and the prisoner entered a world without borders, a world in which the fact of being in prison was of absolutely no significance. But no matter how many astonishing things I saw in these unforgettable weeks of undisturbed inner focus, nothing was more surprising or unexpected than this: to realize how much of what was peculiar to this life occurred in carefully preserved seclusion; how much the seemingly communicative man who carried on a world-wide correspondence still never wanted to expose in words the core of his existence. It was precisely in the seclusion, the limitation, the silence of Goethe that made the strongest impact on Pieper. Here was modern Germany’s quintessential conversationalist intellectual, but the strength of his words came from the restraint behind them, even to the point of purposeful forgetting:The culmination is when the eighty-year-old sees forgetting not as a convulsive refusal to think of things, but as what could almost be termed a physiological process of simple forgetting as a function of life. He praises as “a great gift of the gods” . . . “the ethereal stream of forgetfulness” which he “was always able to value, to use, and to heighten.” However manifold the forms of this silence and of their unconscious roots and conscious motives may have been, is it not always the possibility of hearing, the possibility of a purer perception of reality that is aimed at? And so, is not Goethe’s type of silence above all the silence of one who listens? . . . This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim,” to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do.” . . . The meaning of being silent is hearing – a hearing in which the simplicity of the receptive gaze at things is like the naturalness, simplicity, and purity of one receiving a confidence, the reality of which is creatura, God’s creation. And insofar as Goethe’s silence is in this sense a hearing silence, to that extent it has the status of the model and paradigm – however much, in individual instances, reservations and criticism are justified. One could remain circumspectly silent about this exemplariness after the heroic nihilism of our age has proclaimed the attitude of the knower to be by no means that of a silent listener but rather as that of self-affirmation over against being: insight and knowledge are naked defiance, the severest endangering of existence in the midst of the superior strength of concrete being. The resistance of knowledge opposes the oppressive superior power. However, that the knower is not a defiant rebel against concrete being, but above all else a listener who stays silent and, on the basis of his silence, a hearer – it is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West.Pieper concludes his remarkable find with this summation:When such talk, which one encounters absolutely everywhere in workshops and in the marketplace – and as a constant temptation – , when such deafening talk, literally out to thwart listening, is linked to hopelessness, we have to ask is there not in silence – listening silence – necessarily a shred of hope? For who could listen in silence to the language of things if he did not expect something to come of such awareness of the truth? And, in a newly founded discipline of silence, is there not a chance not merely to overcome the sterility of everyday talk but also to overcome its brother, hopelessness – possibly if only to the extent that we know the true face of this relationship? I know that here quite different forces come into play which are beyond human control, and perhaps the circulus has to be broken through in a different place. However, one may ask: could not the “quick, strict resolution” to remain silent at the same time serve as a kind of training in hope?
£8.33
ISI Books Beauty Will Save The World: Recovering the Human
Book SynopsisGregory Wolfe has been called “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation.” In This penetrating and wide-ranging book he makes a powerful case for the importance of beauty and imagination to cultural renewal. Wolfe shows how we draw nourishment from the deepest sources of culture: art and religious faith.
£16.10
Bucknell University Press,U.S. The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the
Book SynopsisThe Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.Trade Review“Schlipphacke’s smart style brings the eighteenth-century tableau into vivid life. This wonderfully learned study expands our understanding of the eighteenth-century tableau beyond its immediate theatrical and painterly associations to show how it reframed models of family and kinship. Challenging the long standing presumption that the Bildungsroman coalesced around the nuclear family, Schlipphacke illuminates the tableau’s elastic depiction of porous social relations across an array of genres and media. Her queer, allegorical sensibility draws our attention away from the hermeneutic depths of the Romantic nuclear family onto the tableau’s surface alignments. The Aesthetics of Kinship brilliantly condenses eighteenth-century theories of spectatorship, theater, and the novel.”— Daniel Purdy, author of On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought “Schlipphacke demonstrates an active curiosity and adept intellect as she analyzes literary forms (such as unconventional endings and halted narrative progression) as challenges to the inward-focused, nuclear family as it begins to unfold into the nineteenth century. Rare is the scholar who links the study of social relations to aesthetics.”— Alice Kuzniar, author of The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism “The Aesthetics of Kinship provides a thoroughly new understanding of how German authors, including major ones like Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, used tableaux, props, and letters to highlight multiple types of family kinships that depict heterogeneous social groupings that highlight diversity, and that defy any narrow definition of ‘family.’”— Susan Gustafson, author of Goethe’s Families of the Heart “Historically significant and extremely timely! Schlipphacke’s fascinating turn to the period tableaux compellingly illustrates aesthetic experiments with diverse forms of relations, fruitfully challenging accounts of the rise of the nuclear family.”— Stefani Engelstein, author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of ModernityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Middle Class/Bourgeois/Bürger: The Idiosyncrasies of German Dramatic Realism 2 Tableau/Tableau Vivant: German-French Dramatic Encounters 3 The German Dramatic Tableau beyond Lessing 4 Against Interiority: Letters and Portraits as Dramatic Props 5 Material Kinship: The Economy of Props in G.E. Lessing’s Nathan der Weise 6 The Tableau of Relations: Novels in Stillness and Motion 7 Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] Concluding Reflections Acknowledgments Bibliography Index
£36.00
Sternberg Press Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices
£9.99
Bard Graduate Center, Exhibitions Department Conserving Active Matter
Book SynopsisConsiders the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, “Cultures of Conservation,” was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter.Trade Review"This book pursues conservation as an interdisciplinary endeavor, bringing together scholars of material culture, history, philosophy, Indigeneity, material scientists and conservators to take a stake in conservation, “together-apart,” borrowing from Karen Barad, in a mindful way and on a scale that is unprecedented to date." -- Hanna B. Hölling * Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte *Table of ContentsPreface: Report on a Research Project Acknowledgments Introduction: Conserving Active Matter and the ConservatorSoon Kai Poh Introduction: Conserving Active Matter and the HistorianPeter N. Miller1. Philosophyone Introduction: Active Matter—Some Initial Philosophical ConsiderationsIvan Gaskell and A. W. Eatontwo The Expressive Import of Degradation and Decay in Contemporary ArtSherri Irvinthree The Look of Age: Appearance and RealityCarolyn Korsmeyerfour The Aesthetics of RepairYuriko Saito five Death and Entanglement: Some Thoughts about Life, Love, and the Aims of Art ConservationAlva Noë2. Historysix Introduction: Conserving Active Matter and the Art Historian’s CraftIttai Weinrybseven Active Matter in Presocratic Thought?André Lakseight Active Matter: A Philosophical Aberration or a Very Old Belief?Guido Giglioninine Oak and Oil, Chalk and Flint—Rood Screens and ChurchesSpike Bucklowten Bread and Wine, Body and BloodLee Palmer Wandel3. Indigenous Ontologieseleven Introduction: For the Lives of Things—Indigenous Ontologies of Active MatterAaron Glasstwelve Living Knowledge in Cultural CollectionsSven Haakansonthirteen The Orator’s Dilemma: Wampum as Material, Media, Medicine, and MemoryJamie Jacobs fourteen Always Becoming Better Stewards: Caring for Collections at the National Museum of the American IndianKelly McHughfifteen Hoki Mauri: Bring Back the Life EssenceRose Evans4. Materialssixteen Introduction: Developing Informed and Sustainable Responses to the Alteration of Cultural Artifacts; Materials Engineering Meets Material CultureJennifer L. Massseventeen Contextualizing the Installation of Tania Bruguera’s Untitled (Havana 2000)Chris McGlincheyeighteen Moving beyond the Binaries: Exploring the Active Matter of Metal Soaps in PaintFrancesca Casadionineteen Characterizing the Immaterial: Noninvasive Imaging and Analysis of Stephen Benton’s Engine no. 9Marc Walton, Pengxiao Hao, Marc Vermeulen, Florian Willomitzer, and Oliver Cossairttwenty Making Meiji Red: Semiotic Activity in the Colors of Japanese Woodblock Prints, 1864–1900Marco Leona and Henry D. Smith II Appendix: Events of the Research Project Conserving Active Matter Index Contributors
£52.00
Les Belles Lettres Ion
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£37.25
Klincksieck Pour Une Philosophie de la Creation
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£44.00
Klincksieck Du Sacre Dans l'Art Actuel ?
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£28.00
Klincksieck Penser l'Art: Histoire de l'Art Et Esthetique
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£42.00
Klincksieck L'Art Dans Tous Ses Extremes
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£31.00
Klincksieck Naissances d'Images: L'Image Dans l'Image, Des
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£26.60
Les Belles Lettres Kierkegaard
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£41.00
Encre Marine L'Inexpressif Musical: Suivi de Question Sans
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£31.30
Encre Marine Origine de la Peinture: Sur Rembrandt, Cezanne Et
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£30.00
Classiques Garnier Theophile Gautier Et La Religion de l'Art
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£35.15
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Fenelon Et Les Arts Du Dessin: Instruire Par
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£38.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin L'Oeuvre Architecturale: 1945
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£23.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin La Visibilite de l'Image: Histoire Et
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£999.99
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin La Philosophie Des Films
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£31.35
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Etienne Souriau: Une Ontologie de l'Instauration
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£22.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Textes Cles d'Esthetique de l'Environnement:
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£17.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Essais de Philosophie de la Musique: Definition,
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£16.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin L'Esthetique de la Musique
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£17.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Le Systeme Des Arts: Histoire Et Hypothese
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£31.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Ecrits Esthetiques
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£29.45
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin L'Autre Scene: Philosophie Du Theatre
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£999.99
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Une Science Autrichienne de la Forme: Robert
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£23.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Les Evades de la Medecine: Physiologie de l'Art
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£35.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Fictions Filmiques: Comment (Et Pourquoi) Le
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£15.11
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Propos Realistes
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£16.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Paul Klee, l'Oeil En Trop
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£26.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin La Couleur Du Gout: Psychologie Et Esthetique Au
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£22.00
Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin Puissance de la Musique
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£18.46
