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Affects, Actions and Passions in Spinoza: The Unity of Body and Mind

Chantal Jaquet

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is ... More

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is an opportunity to reflect on the impact and value of these references to Spinoza, which historians of philosophy eye with caution because they are all too often based on second-hand knowledge, and frequently distort the philosopher's thought. That is why it is crucial to reexamine the question of the mind-body relationship and its affective modalities in Spinoza from a philosophical angle and identify a model for interpreting it that is capable of informing contemporary debates.Less

The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (eds)

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature ... More

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature itself.The Afterlives of Georges Perec examines the impact of Perec’s ideas, writing and analytical experimentation in architecture, art and design, media, electronic communications and computing, and studies of the everyday. It asks: what are the lessons that architects, artists, game-designers and writers can draw from Perec’s fascination with creative constraints? What do his descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about use of information and communications technologies? What happens if we readLife A User’s Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies? How might his fascination with the ‘infra-ordinary’ shed light on the uses of contemporary social media? What insights might Perec’s use of algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities? Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.Less

Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity

Maria Voyatzaki (ed.)

This book gathers 14 voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. By transversally crossing ... More

This book gathers 14 voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. By transversally crossing disciplinary boundaries, new and profound insights into contemporary thinking and creating architecture emerge. The book is at the forefront of the current contemplation on matter and its significance for and within architecture. The premise is that matter in posthuman times has to be rethought in the rich and multifaceted context of contemporary computational architecture, and in the systemic and ecological context of pervasive computer simulations. Combining the dynamism of materiality and the capacities of nonhuman machines towards prototyping spatiotemporal designs and constructs, leads to alternative conceptions of the human, of ethics, aesthetics and politics in this world yet-to-come. The reader, through the various approaches presented by the authors’ perspectives, will appreciate that creativity can come from allowing matter to take the lead in the feedback loop of the creative process towards a relevant outcome evaluated as such by a matter of concern actualised within the ecological milieu of design. The focus is on the authors’ speculative dimension in their multifaceted role of discussing materiality by recognising that a transdisciplinary mode is first and foremost a speculative praxis in our effort to trace materiality and its affects in creativity. The book is not interested in discussing technicalities and unidirectional approaches to materiality, and retreats from a historical linear timeline of enquiry whilst establishing a sectional mapping of materiality’s importance in the emergent future of architecture.Less

Artmaking in the Age of Global Capitalism: Visual Practices, Philosophy, Politics

Jan Bryant

What strategies are visual artists and filmmakers using to criticise the social and economic conditions shaping our particular historical moment? This question is answered by considering the methods ... More

What strategies are visual artists and filmmakers using to criticise the social and economic conditions shaping our particular historical moment? This question is answered by considering the methods and political implications of artists or filmmakers working in a contemporary western art context today. Leading into extended analyses of works by Frances Barrett, Claire Denis, Angela Brennan, and Alex Monteith, the book considers two forces that have informed contemporary artmaking: the economic conditions that began changing social realities from the 1970s forward; and the current tendency of the political aesthetic to move away from direct political content or didacticism to a concern for the sensate effects of materials. This is framed by Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ and Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. As historical ground for understanding the contemporary condition, Artmaking in the Age of Global Economics pays particular attention to the divisions that opened up between progressive writers, theorists and artists in the late 20th century. Suggesting an alternative approach to understanding art’s historical antecedents, it avoids received art-historical narratives or canonical figures, refuting both the autonomy of art as well as the separation of artist from the work they produce. It locates, instead, contemporary art in a worldly context of responsibility that opens up to an ethics of practice. [211]Less

Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film

Charlotte de Mille

John Mullarkey (ed.)

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, ... More

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography, and film. This new collection of essays from world-renowned art theorists, philosophers, and Bergson-scholars will provide both a wide historical context and a rigorous conceptual framework for contemporary art-theory and practice involving the concepts of rhythmic duration, perception, affectivity, the body, memory, and intuition – all of which were given their first systematic theorization in the twentieth-century as immanent objects through the work of Bergson.Less

Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

John Beck and Ryan Bishop (eds)

What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies ... More

What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies and attitudes that were forged during World War II and developed into organisational structures during the long Cold War. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.Less

Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media

John Armitage and Joanne Roberts (eds)

This book presents an examination of the relations between historical and, crucially, contemporary ideas of luxury. The book provides a technocultural focus on aesthetic, design-led media practice ... More

This book presents an examination of the relations between historical and, crucially, contemporary ideas of luxury. The book provides a technocultural focus on aesthetic, design-led media practice with key case studies, including Hiroshi Sugimoto's Silk Shiki for Hermès, the plain white T-shirt, and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LMVH). To understand luxury, the book considers the socio-cultural value and market price of luxury; the desire for luxury; the social and spatial construction of luxury; the object and art of luxury consumption; architecture as a luxury commodity; and geographies of production and consumption, as illustrated by the Louis Vuitton website.Less

Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

Barbara Kennedy

This book aims to re-ignite debates about film as an art form – as part of an aesthetic process that incorporates the ‘bodies’ of our material, technological and molecular worlds. The author suggests ... More

This book aims to re-ignite debates about film as an art form – as part of an aesthetic process that incorporates the ‘bodies’ of our material, technological and molecular worlds. The author suggests that these different perceptions of ‘body’ are responsible, as well as the brain/mind, for the ways in which visual elements of colour, movement, rhythm and sensation are acquired within, through and beyond our consciousness. Through discussions of Orlando, The English Patient, Romeo and Juliet, Strange Days and Leon, the book posits a creative collusion between Deleuzian philosophy – specifically Deleuze's ideas about desire, pleasure, sensation, affect and ‘becoming-woman’ – and contemporary film studies.Less

The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World

Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White

Originating in a series of conversations between the poet Kenneth White and the philosopher Jeff Malpas that took place over four days at White’s Breton home, The Fundamental Field is made up of two ... More

Originating in a series of conversations between the poet Kenneth White and the philosopher Jeff Malpas that took place over four days at White’s Breton home, The Fundamental Field is made up of two essays: the first is by White on Malpas; the second is by Malpas on White. The volume closes with a set of three new philosophical poems by White. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hölderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, the essays address questions of world, place, narrative, language and politics, from within two constellations of ideas: White’s geopoetics and Malpas’ philosophical topology/topography. Together, and in their separate essays, the poet and philosopher traverse a common field, one in which both poetry and philosophy are founded.Less

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus

John Llewelyn

The Early Mediaeval Scottish philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus shook traditional doctrines of logical universality and logical particularity by arguing for a metaphysics of ‘formal ... More

The Early Mediaeval Scottish philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus shook traditional doctrines of logical universality and logical particularity by arguing for a metaphysics of ‘formal distinction’. Why did the Nineteenth Century poet and self-styled philosopher Gerard Manley Hopkins find this revolutionary teaching so appealing? John Llewelyn answers this question by casting light on various neologisms introduced by Hopkins and reveals how Hopkins endorses Scotus’s claim that being and existence are grounded in doing and willing. Drawing on modern respon ses to Scotus made by Heidegger, Peirce, Arendt, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Derrida and Deleuze, Llewelyn’s own response shows by way of bonus why it would be a pity to suppose that the rewards of reading Scotus and Hopkins are available only to those who share their theological presuppositionsLess

The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political

Janae Sholtz

The Invention of a People explores the residual relation between Heidegger’s thought and Deleuze’s novelty. Contextualising the problematic of a people-to-come within a larger political and ... More

The Invention of a People explores the residual relation between Heidegger’s thought and Deleuze’s novelty. Contextualising the problematic of a people-to-come within a larger political and philosophical context of postwar thinkers of community, the book addresses the impasses resulting from the philosophical prioritization of sameness and identity and casts Deleuze’s project as both an extension and radicalization of the Heideggerian themes of immanence, ontological difference and the transformative potential of art. Through interstitial readings of Paul Klee, Kostos Axelos, Arthur Rimbaud, the 1960’s art collective Fluxus, and contemporary artist Brian Fridge, the book offers creative encounters between Heidegger and Deleuze which act as provocations from the outside, opening new lines of flight and hitherto unthought terrain. A key claim is that to become worthy of the events that befall us, philosophy must move from ontology to a fluxology, which is predicated upon the cultivation of a new sensibility for the affect and immanence. Insisting on the necessary entwinement of the aesthetic and the political, the author develops a diagrammatic image of a people-to-come that is constantly in flux and can answer the demands of the untimely future.Less

Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World

Fiona Hughes

Drawing on resources from both the analytical and continental traditions, this book argues that a comprehension of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics is necessary for grasping the scope and force of his ... More

Drawing on resources from both the analytical and continental traditions, this book argues that a comprehension of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics is necessary for grasping the scope and force of his epistemology. It draws on phenomenological and aesthetic resources to bring out the continuing relevance of Kant's project. One of the difficulties faced in reading ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’ is finding a way of reading the text as one continuous discussion. This book offers a reading at each stage of Kant's epistemological argument, showing how various elements of Kant's argument, often thought of as extraneous or indefensible, can be integrated. Arguing for the centrality of aesthetics in philosophy, and within experience in general, it challenges a blind spot in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy and will contribute to a growing interest in the general significance of aesthetic culture.Less

Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou

Sarah Hickmott

This book looks at the way music is used, characterised and understood in the work of Nancy, Labarthe and Badiou. Despite the differences in their philosophical-theoretical positions, they all invoke ... More

This book looks at the way music is used, characterised and understood in the work of Nancy, Labarthe and Badiou. Despite the differences in their philosophical-theoretical positions, they all invoke music – both directly and indirectly – to negotiate their relationship to ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. The book situates these texts in a longer genealogy of musico-philosophical interactions and also brings them into dialogue with recent musicological approaches, thus showing how an inherited idea of what music ‘is’ is often assumed rather than critically re-evaluated. It argues that though music is instrumentalized by progressive thinkers as a way of shifting theoretical/philosophical paradigms, it nonetheless does so in a way that has a strong sense of continuity with previous thinking on music. Secondly, the book highlights the way in which music in its metaphysical-ontological guise is often conceived as synonymous with Western high art classical music (which is itself constructed as absolute and transcendent, and ontologically independent of its means of (re)production or context) whilst non-literate, popular, folk and world musics – on the occasions that they are addressed and not simply ignored or denigrated – are notably considered almost exclusively in terms of their social-cultural or technological contexts. Finally, the book demonstrates that much of this takes place through a simultaneous instrumentalization of gender as an organisational category for philosophy, and one which all too often has the consequence of sending women – along with music – to the beyond of pre-, inter-, or post-signification.Less

Narrative and Becoming

Ridvan Askin

What is narrative? Ridvan Askin answers this question by bringing together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn. Through ... More

What is narrative? Ridvan Askin answers this question by bringing together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn. Through this process he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Against the established consensus of narrative theory he argues for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive. Narrative and Becoming provides close readings of a number of contemporary North American fictions, most prominently Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), showcasing their genuine metaphysical quality.Less

Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy

Suzie Attiwill, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, and Antonia Pont

Practising with Deleuze offers the first systematic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s mature philosophy from the perspective of contemporary creative practitioners, including fine artists, a dancer, a ... More

Practising with Deleuze offers the first systematic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s mature philosophy from the perspective of contemporary creative practitioners, including fine artists, a dancer, a creative writer, designer and philosopher. It offers a way of rethinking notions of aesthetics, art, and creativity within the field of practice. Unconventional in presentation, this book is reflective of the engagement of contemporary creative practices with the generative philosophy of Deleuze. Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of production - practising, forming, framing, experiencing, and encountering - and is accompanied by short summary texts outlining the context of Deleuze’s contributions to each of these aspects. These discussions contextualise Deleuzian thought within a range of practices. In so doing, they enable the reader to approach these philosophical concepts within the milieu of creative practice.Less

Speculative Art Histories: Analysis at the Limits

Sjoerd van Tuinen (ed.)

Following the recent ‘speculative turn’ in Continental philosophy, the aim of this volume is to propose a ‘counter-discourse’ of speculative approaches to art history. How could today’s materialist, ... More

Following the recent ‘speculative turn’ in Continental philosophy, the aim of this volume is to propose a ‘counter-discourse’ of speculative approaches to art history. How could today’s materialist, realist, pragmatist, vitalist or object-oriented speculations offer alternatives to the mere complementarity of philosophy of art and art history, often based on mutual recognition and critical limitation rather than imaginative crossovers? What new intermedial methodologies for art and art historical writing do they provide? Or vice versa, how can the encounter with art induce new forms of philosophy? How do speculative concepts of time, past and contingency challenge typically modern engagements with art’s ‘history’? Is there, for example, an unexpected contemporary relevance for pre-modern, e.g. or mannerist or gothic ideas of art? Is it possible for art history to experience a work of art in its novelty beyond its historical facticity? And what is the speculative potential of works of art themselves? Does the speculative open up new ways of extending art into fields of biology, mathematics or the digital? What is the ‘thing’ or ‘object’ of art, whether inanimate or animate? What does it mean to have an ‘idea’? And finally, what remains of ‘beauty’ and ‘expressivity’, after decades of critical mistrust and embarrassed deconstruction?Less

Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future

Stephen Zepke

The book analyses recent philosophical discussions of Kant’s theory of the sublime, and the artistic examples these give or provoke, in order to construct a diagram of sublime contemporary art. This ... More

The book analyses recent philosophical discussions of Kant’s theory of the sublime, and the artistic examples these give or provoke, in order to construct a diagram of sublime contemporary art. This diagram will have the immediate aim of producing a new genealogy of post-war art that avoids the modern/postmodern rupture, in favour of a sublime art that can utilise both traditional and new media and has the production of the future as its political goal. The book will draw on both philosophical discourse and art history and theory in making its argument. The introduction will give an account of the historical emergence of the sublime, concentrating on Kant. The following five chapters will each discuss a contemporary philosopher’s reading of Kant’s sublime (Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière, Jameson), and also consider their artistic examples. From this will be drawn a diagram of sublime art that incorporates the most useful aspects of each thinker, and also outlines a new genealogy of post-war art. The sixth chapter will then use this diagram, and its artistic genealogy, to offer a theory of contemporary artistic practices as an aesthetic politics (ie., a biopolitics) that overcomes the current (postmodern) impasse between art and life. The conclusion will project this new diagram into the future.Less

Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer

Nicholas Davey

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s poetics completely overturns the European aesthetic tradition. By concentrating on the experience of meaning, this book shows how Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics transforms ... More

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s poetics completely overturns the European aesthetic tradition. By concentrating on the experience of meaning, this book shows how Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics transforms aesthetics into a mode of attentive practice. Gadamer’s poetics has deep implications for all of the humanities, and how we can understand the meaning of poetry, art, literature, history and theology. His emphasis on participation promises, an approach that will revolutionise aesthetic and hermeneutic practice, and gives us new ways to think about the cultural productivity and social legitimacy of the humanities.Less