Philosophy: aesthetics Books

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 SynopsisTrade Review“In these pages Benjamin Steege recovers, at the very margins of the musical sciences, and against all the odds, a Heideggerian moment, the reverberations of which he traces from the 1920s until they all but fade from hearing three decades later. In the depth and breadth of its synthesis, An Unnatural Attitude provides a model for what it means to write imaginatively about music and conceptual thought.” * Brian Hyer, University of Wisconsin–Madison *“Between the hard-edged Platonism of musical form and the reduction of musical experience to mere psychological effect, an intricate and reflective style of musical thought emerged in Weimar Germany that was influenced by Edmund Husserl’s novel method of phenomenology. Steege’s deep dive into these forgotten figures—supported by forays into political history, textured close readings, and complete translations of primary texts—is a philosophical feast. It illuminates a complicated strain of European music theory embroiled in evolving debates about musical ontology, cultural difference, and social change.” * Michael Gallope, author of 'Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable' *"Enriched by convincing music-analytical examples, careful handling of philosophical terms of art, and an ethical sensitivity not unlike that of its historical interlocutors, Steege's book—and the writers whose work it examines—is sure to draw attention from music historians and historians of philosophy alike, who will question the relative unfamiliarity of its subject matter and set out to reach out across this gap to explore the models of historical listening it offers." * New Books Network *"Steege's work is an important contribution to music aesthetics." * Choice *"An Unnatural Attitude is a serious intellectual history that brings to light the musical thought of actors unfamiliar to the vast majority of music scholars. Ambitiously, Steege writes of both local and global concerns. At times, he suggests that the intentional manner with which one engages with music can shape the history of feeling; at others, he explicates music’s role in forging various types of community and in responding to human-led catastrophes. Densely written and always precise, An Unnatural Attitude is likely to establish itself as a central treatment of its topic: musicologists clearly need to think more deeply about the ideological, philosophical and political implications of that strange practice we call listening." * Twentieth-Century Music *"Even if one might feel the tension differently oneself, there is no question that this text maintains and communicates it with tremendous skill and historical sensitivity, in both its main chapter sequence and the translated essays that make up a rich set of appendixes." * Notes *Table of ContentsList of Examples Introduction Worldhood and World War Max Scheler, “Genius of War” Musicology in the World From Psychology to Phenomenology Music in Phenomenological Study Chapter 1 The Unnatural Attitude The Acoustical Attitude and the Harmonic Attitude Beyond Psychologism “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” Chapter 2 Debussy, Outward and Open An Outward Turn Dehumanization Being-There-With Music Letting Oneself Go Actuality Chapter 3 Hearing-With Case One Aesthetic Hearing (Seventeenth-Century Suite) Joining In Vocal Hearing and Instrumental Hearing Case Two Participatory Hearing (Thirteenth-Century Motet) Factical Life Spacing The Limits of Community Chapter 4 Techniques of Feeling This Is Not a Test Techniques of Feeling A Call Appendix A Hans Mersmann, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1925) Appendix B Helmuth Plessner, “Response [to Mersmann]” (1925) Appendix C Paul Bekker, “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” (1925) Appendix D Herbert Eimert, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1926) Appendix E Günther Stern-Anders, “On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music)” (1927) Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTeachersof literature make judgments about value.Theytelltheirstudentswhichworks are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange,orinsightfuland thus,whichare more worthy oftime and attention than others. Yetthe field of literary studieshaslargely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitablyrootedin prejudice or entangled in problems of social status.For several decades now, professors havecalledtheirwork value-neutral,simplya means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge. ?Michael W. Clune's provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education.It is impossible, Clune argues, toseparatejudgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment,transcendingconsumer culture and market preferences.Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories ofknowledge andperception,Cluneadvocates forthe cultivation of whatJohnKeats called negative capability, the capacity to place existing criteria in doubtand to discover new concepts and new values in artworks.Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works byKeats,Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close readingthe profession's traditional key skillharnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.Trade 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 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 ofTrade 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 SynopsisTrade Review“As hard to pigeonhole as Taylor’s prolific and wide-ranging career, Seeing Silence is not exactly philosophy, or spiritual autobiography, or art theory. It is a textual antechamber leading into—or perhaps a frame surrounding—the sculpture in which the life-work of the philosopher-turned-artist lies exposed . . . Taylor leads us on a pilgrimage of revelatory encounters. . . Taylor combines the conceptual, perceptual, and affective with the concretely historical and factual, while offering something more than, and irreducible to, these aspects: a sense for the work as a moment, in each case unique, of silence becoming visible, and visible growing silent.” -- Anthony Curtis Adler * Los Angeles Review of Books *"A glowing melange of philosophy, theology, and art criticism." -- Daniel Schwartz * On the Seawall *“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 Vienna“When we see silence we see the world without us. Yet Seeing Silence is not simply a book about death; it is also an invitation to rethink visual art as ‘words of silence.’ Taylor conducts us through a noiseless landscape, at once frightening and beautiful, in which Kierkegaard, Jabès, and Bergman, among so many others, are companions for the journey. Artists will delight in this new book as much as scholars will benefit from it.” -- Kevin Hart, University of Virginia“Taylor turns the cacophony of our environment, actual and virtual, toward redemptive moments of silence, all the more rich in implication for how rare they have become. Alongside deep learning in literature, philosophy, and theology, fresh attention to nonverbal cognates in architecture, painting, and sculpture carry the reader to unanticipated recognitions. From each nested instance to the next, intimations of the infinite, not to say the divine, emerge in the undisclosed, the unsayable, and the unsounded.” -- Thomas Crow, New York University“Seeing Silence succeeds wonderfully. . . . Taylor’s case starts with the claim that seeing silence grants access to reality. This makes it something of a countercultural practice in noisy times like ours when reality is presented in unlimited streaming information, ongoing notifications, and always-available chatrooms. Taylor’s book stands apart for the originality of his vision, the particularity of his thesis, and, notably, the canon of authors and artists on which he draws.” -- Jeffrey L. Kosky, Washington and Lee University“Seeing Silence begins in medias res, in the way of an intellectual history, the narrative epic of a memoirist. What happens when there is no time outside of us, when we do not exist in time? Said another way, the book begins and finishes, but has no Origin and End, as both are swathed by an encompassing Silence that somehow manages to speak. Here Taylor is at his most admirable originality. . . . This book will be of great importance to academic specialists in philosophy of religion, theology, aesthetics, and other arts. But it is so charmingly written that it should appeal as well to the ‘public intellectual,’ and to all humanistically competent readers.” -- Ray L. Hart, Boston University“Seeing Silence is indeed a book on the presence of God in art, silence being only one of the keys to understanding this presence. But going further, Seeing Silence proposes a comprehensive theology of art that uses silence to speak the name of God. . . . The book is less concerned with investigating silence as art or silence as an element in a work of art, but rather the question of what art–and the image in particular–can do to approach the elusive concept of silence.” -- Vincent Debiais * Arts et Intelligences du Silence (Translated from French) *"Readers interested in philosophical aesthetics, life writing, Continental hermeneutics, and negative or apophatic theology will find much to enjoy and ponder in Seeing Silence. Simply put, Seeing Silence is an innovative, enlightening, personal work that rewards careful reading and deep appreciation." * Reading Religion *Table 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 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 SynopsisMusing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne said of himself, I am sensible that a process is going onand has been, ever since I came to Italythat puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before.This is a book devoted to the reflective analysis of the enterprise in which many of us, like Hawthorne, find ourselves engaged: the cultivation of our taste. Charles Wegener writes for and from the standpoint of thoughtful amateurs, those who, loving the beautiful and the sublime, wish to become more fully the sort of person to whom these goods reliably disclose themselves. Here traditional aesthetic analysis is redirected to a search for the norms that tell us how we use our intelligence, our imagination, and our senses in becoming more fastidious, yet more sensible, exploring such concepts as disinterestedness, catholicity, communicability, austerity, objectivity, and authority.

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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 is the first book to explore all central issues surrounding the relationship between the film-image and philosophy. It tackles the work of particular philosophers of film (Žižek, Deleuze and Cavell) as well as general philosophical positions (Cognitivist and Culturalist), and analyses the ability of film to teach and create philosophy.Trade Review'In this engaging, comprehensive, incisive work, Mullarkey addresses whether film can philosophize on its own, adding something original, rather than simply illustrating concepts that philosophers extract from their own discourse An indispensible work for students/scholars in philosophy of film/art, aesthetics, and film studies.' D.W.Rothermel, CHOICE '...addresses the question of the relation between art and philosophy - the age-old problem of aesthetics - in an entirely original manner by examining how film changes the terms of this debate.' '...to summarize Mullarkey's text in terms of his criticism of other film theorists does not do justice to the intricate readings and impressive scope of Mullarkey's overall approach. His engagement with figures such as Jacques Rancière, Edward Branigan, Joseph Anderson, Badiou, and Cavell (to name a few) lead him to fascinating 'partial' observations on the nature of film.' 'The gesture Mullarkey employs - a graceful, seamless move from critical analysis to constructive observation - suggests a pluralistic strategy based on an ethics of affirmation and acknowledgement.' '...as a treatment of the question 'what does film mean for philosophy?', Mullarkey offers an intricate and considered study - with important consequences for philosophy in terms of what can be said, and what may be gestured to only by attention to what is left unsaid - that is to say, through a constellation of plural and variably flawed refractions.' - Amanda Dennis in The International Journal for Philosophical Studies 'This book, in some sense, brings to an end a certain phase of film theorizing and instead looks toward something quite new: how theories have been written and how they may be written, how they fall into types, how these types are filling out not a logical grid but a grid of the anxieties we feel, and the defenses we erect toward the everyday. A wonderful, ground-breaking book.' - Edward Branigan (University of California, Santa Barbara), author of Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory and Narrative Comprehension and Film 'Highly original both in its concern for avoiding the illustrative approach generally favoured by philosophers, and in the speculative ambition that looms behind the critical edge of its readings of contemporary film- philosophers. The very question "when does the film itself happen?" is a fundamental one, which is rarely addressed. Mullarkey is opening the door to a brand new type of philosophical engagement with films.' - Elie During (Université de Paris X-Nanterre), author of Matrix: Machine philosophique 'Mullarkey brings an informed, critical view to a number of theories from both the Continental tradition (his specialization) and the Anglo-American tradition...Refractions of Reality is an original and valuable contribution to the field of film philosophy...It is perhaps most valuable in its highly successful dislocation of the rigid, myopic perspective of so many contemporary theories' - Joseph Mai, Notre Dame Philosophy ReviewsTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface: The Film-Envy of Philosophy Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything! Illustrating Manuscripts Bordwell and Other Cogitators Žižek and the Cinema of Perversion Deleuze's Kinematic Philosophy Cavell, Badiou, and Other Ontologists Expanded Cognitions and the Speeds of Cinema Fabulation, Process and Event Refractions of Reality Or, What is Thinking Anyway? Conclusion: Code Unknown - A Bastard Theory for a Bastard Art Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisMetaethics occupies a central place in analytical philosophy, and the last forty years has seen an upsurge of interest in questions about the nature and practice of morality. This collection presents original and ground-breaking research on metaethical issues from some of the very best of a new generation of philosophers working in this field.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Series Editors' Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction; M.Brady Non-Naturalist Ethical Realism; W.Fitzpatrick Naturalistic Metaethics at Half Price; J.Gert In Defence of Moral Error Theory; J.Olson The Myth of Moral Fictionalism; T.Cuneo & S.Christy Metaethics and the Philosophy of Language; M.Chrisman How not to Avoid Wishful Thinking; M.Schroeder Internal Reasons and the Motivating Intuition; J.Markovits Beyond Wrong Reasons: The Buck-Passing Account of Value; U.Heuer A Wrong Turn to Reasons?; P.Väyrynen Shmagency Revisited; D.Enoch The Authority of Social Norms; N.Southwood Moral Epistemology; A.Hills Aesthetics, Objectivity and Particularism; S.Mckeever & M.Ridge Index

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Book SynopsisAnalyzing the rise of art in the 18th century, this treatise demonstrates how painting, sculpture and literature were not regarded as valuable art forms before the emergence of a new bourgeois culture. The author reveals how Romantic poets and philosophers invented "art" as we know it today.Trade ReviewA riveting snapshot of the moment in Western intellectual history when art became Art. The New Republic

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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 SynopsisAs illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War.Trade 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 SynopsisArgues that art, especially architecture, music, and painting, is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. This book approaches art as a form of erotic expression that connects sensory richness with primal desire. It argues that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention.Trade ReviewThis wonderful and short book... continues her recent quest of recasting Darwinian biology within a Deleuzean and Nietzschean understanding of sexual difference. -- Arun Saldanha Environment and PlanningTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture 2. Vibration. Animal, Sex, Music 3. Sensation. The Earth, a People, Art Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Grosz argues that art—especially architecture, music, and painting—is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires.Trade ReviewThis wonderful and short book... continues her recent quest of recasting Darwinian biology within a Deleuzean and Nietzschean understanding of sexual difference. -- Arun Saldanha * Environment and Planning *Beautifully written. The sentences unfold and caress you like a plume of exhaled smoke, giving the book’s emphasis on sexual attraction and the eroticism of sensation a physical force. * Comparative Literature Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments1. Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture2. Vibration. Animal, Sex, Music3. Sensation. The Earth, a People, ArtBibliographyIndex

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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 SynopsisTable of ContentsTranslator's Preface: Dead Man Thinking Introduction I. Submedial Space 1. The Submedial Subject and the Flux of Signs 2. The Truth of the Medial and the State of Exception 3. Media-Ontological Suspicion and Philosophical Doubt 4. The Phenomenology of Medial Sincerity 5. The Gaze of the Other 6. The Medium Becomes the Message 7. The Case of Exception and the Truth of the Medial II. The Economy of Suspicion 8. Marcel Mauss: Symbolic Exchange; or, Civilization Under Water 9. Claude Levi-Strauss: Mana; or, the Floating Signifier 10. Georges Bataille: The Potlatch with the Sun 11. Jacques Derrida: The Lack of Time and Its Specters 12. Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Roller Coaster of the Sublime 13. The Time of Signs 14. Suspicion Is the Medium Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPrefaceFirst Words1. Piecemeal Reductionism: A Sense of the Issue2. The New IntentionalismInterlude. A Glance at Reductionism in the Philosophy of Mind3. Beardsley and the Intentionalists4. Intentionalism's Prospects5. A Failed StrategyNotesIndex

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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 SynopsisTrade ReviewRanciere is refreshingly unorthdox in unearthing examples of 'mute speech' not from modernism, but from relatively prosaic realist and naturalist novels. Times Literary Supplement Although the text does not lend itself to quick, light-hearted reading, it does reward thoughtful consideration. The tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that characterize poetics and aesthetics are given space to move in this text -- Jerilyn Sambrooke Church and Postmodern Culture An excellent English translation of Jacques Ranciere's study of literary style... -- Edmund Campion The European Legacy Ranciere offers us fresh ways to understand how we got from a system of poetics that organized a number of particular arts, to an aesthetic regime in which it is now possible to speak of art in the singular. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies One welcomes [an] ambitious, iconoclastic work like Gabriel Rockhill's Mute Speech Radical History, Radical Philosophy

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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 SynopsisTrade Reviewa worthwhile read...a refreshing way to think 'post-modernity' without the brittleness of the 'post'... -- Jill Petersen Adams Continental Philosophy Review [readers are] richly rewarded by a multifaceted survey of the discourse of modernity. -- Klaus Hofmann MLQ Gerhard Richter's rigorously argued book about what he calls 'afterness'... is the lure to thought whose uncertain traces Richter follows through the twists and turns of an enormously suggestive archive, ranging from the work of Kant to Derrida, and from the intricacies of Holderlin's poems to the mise en abyme of Stefan Moses's photographic portraits... Richter's patient tarrying with Nachheit throws into sharp relief the anxious willfulness of those who triumphantly claim to situate themselves 'after theory,' 'after deconstruction,' or 'after the human.' MLN Richter has coined the term 'afterness' to describe the temporal slipperiness of modern experience-he values philosophers and artists that linger with the ephemeral or marginal remainders left over by institutionalized thought and conceptual determination, and the experimental form of his book seeks to both describe and perform this lingering... Richter values the potential for the aesthetic to imagine new collectivities and forms of shared experience and memory. Qui Parle For Richter, coming after should not be misunderstood as merely derivative, belated, or secondary. Instead, he convincingly argues for the recognition of an 'essential' anachronism inherent in any thought that authentically attempts to understand time and history... Richter convincingly connects lucid close readings of particular passages with larger issues of aesthetics, political theory, and philosophy. German Studies Review [Afterness] is a marvel of breadth of vision, precise detail, and depth of thought that philosophers will welcome... We must continue to follow afterness now that Richter's Afterness has appeared, follow it in the sense of Derrida's suivre. To put it formally, after afterness comes nothing that comes-to-be, is to-come, or ever was. Neither the word nor the thing (as, again, Derrida would have said) called afterness can be abandoned or evaded. And that makes Gerhard Richter's Afterness a philosophical event. I conclude my welcoming of it by expressing the hope that Richter will continue with Afterness-for, after all, Hyperion signs his letters to Bellarmin with Nachstens mehr, "More to come, as soon as possible." Research in PhenomenologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Logic of Afterness 1. Afterness and Modernity: A Genealogical Note 2. Afterness and Critique: A Paradigmatic Case 3. Afterness and Aesthetics: End Without End 4. Afterness and Rettung: Can Anything Be Rescued by Defending It? 5. Afterness and Translation: The Politics of Carrying Across 6. Afterness and the Image (I): Unsettling Photography 7. Afterness and the Image (II): Image Withdrawal 8. Afterness and Experience (I): Can Hope Be Disappointed? 9. Afterness and Experience (II): Crude Thinking Rethought 10. Afterness and Experience (III): Mourning, Memory, and the Fictions of Anteriority 11. Afterness and Empty Space: No Longer and Not Yet Afterwards: After-Words Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis book is a bold, sweeping and imaginative argument on the centrality of 'heritage games' in the contemporary world... Each essay is brimming with insights, interesting facts and observations making them highly readable in their own right, or together. -- Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University A work of ebullient imagination, zest, and wit, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony explores the double life of heritage in the making of modern political identities-as both the fixed capital of national hegemony and the fluid currency of novel visions and claims. The book may evoke an aura of timeless homage, but heritage is also a riff in real time. In this acute exploration of its recent, postcolonial iterations, Daniel Herwitz shows that while its role remains much the same, its substance is constantly, ingeniously changing. -- Jean Comaroff, Harvard University Herwitz's book is an important work in aesthetics, for the fate of aesthetics since the eighteenth century is remarkably similar to that of heritage. Both transmit tradition, yet they're also expected to usher in modernity, which signals a break from tradition. So long as these rivalrous demands cannot be reconciled, heritage and aesthetics remain objects of anxiety. In addition, they're inseparable from the histories of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism, yet they're expected to offer political critiques of them. In the end, all these demands are analyzed by Herwitz in an engaging and eloquent fashion. -- Michael Kelly, author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Thoughtfully crafted and elegantly written, this book is pleasant reading for everyone interested in learning about the status of cultural studies around the world... Recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. The Heritage of Heritage 2. Recovering and Inventing the Past: M. F. Husain's Live Action Heritage 3. Sustaining Heritage Off the Road to Kruger Park 4. Monument 5. Renaissance and Pandemic 6. Tocqueville on the Bridge to Nowhere Epilogue Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe first study to unpack American cinema’s long history of representing deathTrade ReviewGenuinely exciting and brimming with original insights. Given cinema's eternal fascination with death, coupled with film theory's obsessive need to explore the crossroads of photographic representation and the end of life, Combs's ambitious attempts to interweave these concerns are welcome and illuminating. -- Adam Lowenstein, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film Combs shows that death in cinema is never just a random theme, but forms an essential aspect of a film's narrative structure and stylistics. I consider this one of the most impressive works I have read in recent years. -- Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity Beautifully written and masterfully balanced between historical research and theoretical reflection, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in what cinema still has to tell us about our relationship to death and dying. -- Domietta Torlasco, author of The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of FilmTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: An Elusive Passage 1. Mortal Recoil: Early American Execution Scenes and the Electric Chair 2. Posthumous Motion: The Deathwork of Narrative Editing 3. Echo and Hum: Death's Acoustic Space in the Early Sound Film 4. Seconds: The Flashback Loop and the Posthumous Voice 5. Terminal Screens: Cinematography and Electric Death Coda: End(ings) 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 new view of the master’s oeuvre, focusing on his ambivalence toward the Emersonian way of thinking he longed to embrace but resisted for the sake of his art.Trade ReviewIn his seminal book, The Murderous Gaze, Rothman emerged as a central voice in the study of Hitchcock with his probing and fine-grained analysis of the filmmaker's style and deep interpretations of his work. This new project builds on the critical premises of his earlier work but modifies its predominantly ironic view of Hitchcock. Here Rothman argues with critical verve that Hitchcock's films also contain a redemptive vision of the perfectibility of human nature. -- Richard Allen, author of Hitchcock's Romantic Irony and co-editor of The Hitchcock Annual Rothman entered the field of film study as a maverick, as a Harvard philosopher, at a time when most film classes were taught in literature and language departments, though he has been vindicated in the last decade by a proliferation of philosophical approaches to cinema. While Rothman draws his examples from all across the Hitchcock canon, his work remains resolutely and productively philosophical in that he grapples with the history of Hitchcock's thinking about film, his thinking with and through film. In tracking Hitchcock's ruminations on love, murder, and mortality Rothman both deepens and illuminates our understanding of Hitchcock's continued and uncanny appeal. -- Leland Poague, Iowa State University In this glittering homage to Emerson, Cavell, and the Master of Suspense, one of our most learned scholars of film opens new pathways to understanding Hitchcock's work as penetrating, provocative, labyrinthine, and exquisitely mortal. -- Murray Pomerance, Author of The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect Nobody knows the films of Alfred Hitchcock better than William Rothman. The idea of linking these wonderful and dense films with an Emersonian vision is inspired. Rothman's training in philosophy combines lucidly with his lifelong devotion to film in producing a work of originality and authority. -- Stanley Cavell, Harvard University William Rothman, who wrote the remarkable Hitchcock: The Murdeous Gaze, now takes a revisionary Emersonian view and seeks to enlist the devilish master of suspense on the side of the angels. -- Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College William Rothman is one of the great close readers of film... In his new book, Must We Kill the Thing We Love?: Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rothman again performs virtuoso acts of close viewing... An important contribution to Hitchcock scholarship. -- David Banash Screen [Rothman's] interpretations are always insightful (and backed up by close readings of cinematic technique) and his demonstration of the relevance of Emerson to Hitchcock is philosophy of film at its best. -- Daniel Shaw New Review of Film and Television StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Drawing a New Circle 1. The Wilde-er Side of Life 2. Accomplices in Murder 3. "I Don't Like Murderers" 4. Little Deaths 5. "The Time to Make Up Your Mind About People Is Never" 6. "But May I Trust You?" 7. Silence and Stasis 8. Talking vs. Living 9. Two Things to Ponder 10. The Dark Side of the Moon 11. Scottie's Dream, Judy's Plan, Madeleine's Revenge 12. Never Again? 13. A Loveless World 14. Birds of a Feather 15. A Mother's Love 16. Every Story Has an Ending Conclusion: Emerson, Film, Hitchcock Notes Acknowledgments 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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