Duchamp and the aesthetics of chance

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages...

Ecce humanitas

Through a critical exploration of violence and the sacred, Ecce Humanitas recasts the fall of liberal humanism. Brad Evans offers a rich analysis of the changing nature of sacrificial violence, from its theological origins to the exhaustion of the victim in the contemporary world.

Eleanor smith's hull house songs

Hull House Songs, newly republished with a critical commentary, recovers the hidden emancipatory possibilities of the Hull-House women's legacy.

Embodying art

Chiara Cappelletto recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world. Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artif...

Energy and forces as aesthetic interventions

This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the energetic in its aesthetic and political potential. The contributions in this volume elucidate maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation, and c...

Expectation

Expectation is a collection of critical texts on literature written between 1977 and 2012 and now made available for the first time in English.

Feminist aesthetics and the politics of modernism

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the opp...

Film worlds

Crafting a philosophy of cinematic art from the keenest insights of the continental and analytic traditions.

Filmosophy

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a...

From shakespeare to existentialism

A classic book by one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and adventurous thinkersFirst published in 1959, From Shakespeare to Existentialism offers Walter Kaufmann’s critical interpretations of some of the greatest minds in Western philosophy, religion, and literature. Few scholars can ma...

Games and rules

Why do we play games and why do we play them on computers? The contributors of »Games and Rules« take a closer look at the core of each game and the motivational system that is the game mechanics. Games are control circuits that organize the game world with their (joint) players and establish mot...

Gaming and the virtual sublime

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime considers the ‘virtual sublime’ as a conceptual toolbox for understanding our affective engagement with contemporary interactive entertainment.

Georges de la tour and the enigma of the visible

This interdisciplinary study explores George de La Tour’s (1593-1652) enigmatic representations of light, vision and the visible in order to question the nature of painting and its religious, artistic and conceptual aspects. Challenging the familiarity of vision, it proposes a spiritual understan...

God, justice, love, beauty

The four talks collected here transcribe lectures delivered to an audience of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, under the auspices of the “little dialogues” series at the Montreuil’s center for the dramatic arts. Modeled on Walter Benjamin’s “Aufklärung für Kinder” radio talks, this ...

Goods

Claims advertising is nothing but a metaphysical hypothesis about the moral nature of things: objects aren't purely physical or economical entities. Any object, regardless of its nature, can become a complex of possible happiness—not just an object of value, but a moral source of perfection f...

Grammatology of images

Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images by asking after imaging as such. How does something a-visible get transformed into an image? The book illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between religion and science...

Gramsci and languages

A ground breaking study that shows Gramsci's originality can be traced to his lifelong interest in language and linguistics.

Groove

In this engaging and original book Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western Music of a new rhythm: Groove.

Head cases

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creat...

Hegel on sacred poetry

Víctor Ibarra B revisits Hegel's early works before 1800 and his dispute with Kant's concept of freedom, to offer a practical account of Hegel's view on sublime art within the context of his philosophy of love.

Hip-hop and philosophy

I want to die, i hate my life

I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas.

Imaginal politics

Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalizat...

Inceptions

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that noncoincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the nontrivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work— its inabi...

Knock me up, knock me down

No longer is pregnancy a repulsive or shameful condition in Hollywood films, but an attractive attribute, often enhancing the romantic or comedic storyline of a female character. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduc...

Landscape aesthetics

This book challenges the common understanding of landscape and aesthetics as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities.

Levinas and the cinema of redemption

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self....

Literature and politics

A Collection of Robert Musil's essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on current events. Introduced and contextualised by Genese Grill and Klaus Amann.

Literature, life, and modernity

Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simple entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects in relation to comple...

Lived-body experiences in virtual reality

Zeynep Akbal explores the impact of virtual reality (VR) technology on the subjective experience of the body.

Looking through images

Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philo...

Lost in thought

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learningIn an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or...

Lyrical individualism

Lyrical Individualism presents a selection of André Colomer’s crucial writings, with a focus on anarchist theory and the philosophy of Henri Bergson.

Maya deren

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream...

Mocking bird technologies

This volume examines the poetics of bird mimicry: the way birds mimic humans, and the way humans mimic birds. Drawing from 18th-century studies, romantic studies, American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies, the collection offers new models for combining comparative and globa...

Nature and landscape

The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aesthetic experience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics, environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just na...

Nietzsche as philosopher

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offer...

Noli me tangere

Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” There is no message without there first being—or, more subtly, without there also being in t...

Of arcs and circles

A designer of Japanese gardens contemplates wildness, humanity, beauty, the liquid state of the world.

Of stigmatology

What if our existence is a product of its interruptions? What if the words that structure our lives are themselves governed by the periods and commas that bring them to a close, or our images by the cinematic cuts that mark them off? Are we, like Chekhov's clerk, who dreams of being pursued by ...