Description
Book SynopsisIn this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Trade ReviewThis is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of
Tragedy, the Greeks, and UsBarbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of
WarholOscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of
The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative RelationsEvery sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it’s new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of
The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Prologue
Part I. Appearing: On the Aesthetic Foundations of Social Life1. Life as a Spectacle: Self-Display, Reflexivity, and Artifice
2. Masks and Clothes: Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing
3. Aesthetic Mediation: A Theory of Representations
4. Figures: Social Images
5. Out of Control: The Alienated Image
Part II. Vanity and Lies: On the Hostility Toward Appearances6. “Vanity Fair”: The Frivolity of Worldliness
7. Against the Mask: The Rise of Social Romanticism
8. Against the Spectacle: The Crusade of Romantic Anticapitalism
9. Against Aesthetic Values: Aestheticism, Aestheticization, and Staging
10. Two Baptisms and a Divorce: Homo Economicus Versus Homo Aestheticus
Part III. Toward a Social Aesthetics: On the Sensible Logic of Society11. The Opening: Aesthetic Foundations of the Common World
12. Aisthesis: Senses and Social Sensibility
13. Social Taste and the Will to Please
14. Aesthetic Labor and Social Design: The Value of Appearances
15. Prestige and Other Magic Spells
Conclusion: Social Immaterialism or the Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Afterword
Appendix: Illustrations Mentioned in the Text
Notes
Index
