Search results for ""zone books""

An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth centuryEating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids.How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own body, devouring it at the risk of destroying it, consuming rather than contemplating it wisely from a distance? What structures of the imagination underlie and justify these desires for incorporation? What are the visual configurations offered up to the mouth, and w

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A compelling analysis of the work of art historian Aby Warburg and its radical implications for the study of visual imagesAby Warburg (1866–1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century, such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg’s project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a “critical iconology” to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg’s method

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A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciencesAt a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman’s body has, once again, become a fraught issue—from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk—Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of “life before birth.”Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of “fetal life” by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother’s living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the co

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