Aesthetics of Standstill

Aesthetics of Standstill PDF

Author: Reinhold Gorling

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3956794672

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Essays consider the temporality and the aesthetics of “standstill.” "Standstill” could be the name for the kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. Standstill may also be the name of an aesthetic strategy to instill a nonlinear time of resistance and experience into the political protocol of progress. Finally, standstill can be the name for the temporal fissure in the midst of the subject, for the lapse between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of a statement, the limit that is the border between the inside and the outside. It can be the name for the mode of potentiality, for the moment of gesture, or, with Walter Benjamin, the medium of the dialectical image. The essays of this book traverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time. Contributors Georges Didi-Huberman, Reinhold Görling, Barbara Gronau, Adrian Heathfield, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Oliver Marchart, Rita McBride, Christoph Menke, Aernout Mik, Misha Kavka, David Lapoujade, Mirjam Lewandowsky, Via Lewandowsky, Peter Osborne, Christine Ross, Marcel Odenbach, Jacques Rancière, Ludger Schwarte, Martin Seel

The Postconceptual Condition

The Postconceptual Condition PDF

Author: Peter Osborne

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1786634228

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Tracking the postconceptual dimensions of contemporary art If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Contemporary art makes this work more difficult than ever. Today’s art is a point of condensation for a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms, and technologies of image production. Contemporary art, Osborne maintains, expresses this condition through its distinctively postconceptual form. These essays—extending the scope and arguments of Osborne’s Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art—move from a philosophical consideration of the changing temporal conditions of capitalist modernity, via problems of formalism, the politics of art and the changing shape of art institutions, to interpretation and analysis of particular works by Akram Zaatari, Xavier Le Roy and Ilya Kabakov, and the postconceptual situation of a crisis-ridden New Music.

Peripheralizing DeLillo

Peripheralizing DeLillo PDF

Author: Thomas Travers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-07-27

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1501378392

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Peripheralizing DeLillo tracks the historical arc of Don DeLillo's poetics as it recomposes itself across the genres of short fiction, romance, the historical novel, and the philosophical novel of time. Drawing on theories that capital, rather than the bourgeoisie, is the displaced subject of the novel, Thomas Travers investigates DeLillo's representation of fully commodified social worlds and re-evaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. Deploying an innovative re-periodisation, Travers considers the evolution of DeLillo's aesthetic forms as they register and encode one of the crises of contemporary historicity: the secular dynamics through which a society organised around waged work tends towards conditions of under- and unemployment. Situating DeLillo within global histories of uneven and combined development, Travers explores how DeLillo's treatment of capital and labour, affect and narration, reconfigures debates around realism and modernism. The DeLillo that emerges from this study is no longer an exemplary postmodern writer, but a composer of capitalist epics, a novelist drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation, zones of social death whose surplus populations his fiction strives to re-historicise, if not re-dialecticise as subjects of history.

Alienation and Theatricality

Alienation and Theatricality PDF

Author: Phoebevon Held

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1351577034

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Alienation (Vefremdung) is a concept inextricably linked with the name of twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht - with modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, as Phoebe von Held argues in this book, 'alienation' as a sociological and aesthetic notionavant la lettre had already surfaced in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study destabilizes the conventional understanding of alienation through a reading ofLe Paradoxe sur le comedien, Le Neveu de Rameau and other works by Diderot, opening up new ways of interpretation and aesthetic practices. If alienation constitutes a historical development for the Marxist Brecht, for Diderot it defines an existential condition. Brecht uses the alienation-effect to undermine a form of naturalism based on subjectivity, identification and illusion; Diderot, by contrast, plunges the spectator into identification and illusion, to produce an aesthetic of theatricality that is profoundly alienating and yet remains anchored in subjectivity.

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas PDF

Author: Umberto Eco

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780674006768

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The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas's conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas's reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas's views on art and compares his poetics with Dante's. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas's aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

Adorno's Aesthetics of Music

Adorno's Aesthetics of Music PDF

Author: Max Paddison

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780521626088

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This introduction to the aesthetics and sociology of music of the German philosopher and music theorist T. W. Adorno is the only book to deal comprehensively with this topic and it has quickly established itself as a classic text.

Hawthorne's Visual Artists and the Pursuit of a Transatlantic Aesthetics

Hawthorne's Visual Artists and the Pursuit of a Transatlantic Aesthetics PDF

Author: Kumiko Mukai

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9783039113682

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Among Hawthorne's primary themes, the visual arts have usually been regarded as an afterthought and have only been examined to elucidate his own personal philosophy. Hawthorne's own contemporaries derided him for his 'mediocre' aesthetics and that view has been taken as received wisdom up to the present day. This study reexamines Hawthorne's aesthetics, and suggests that he was much more familiar with the art and artists of the time than has previously been acknowledged by critics. He developed his own eclectic and transatlantic view of art, a view which incorporated decorative arts like embroidery, while maintaining a modest estimation of his own talents. This book examines the full range of visual artists whom Hawthorne portrays. It argues that these portrayals illuminate the artist's dilemma of being fettered by New England Puritanism while at the same time being attracted to the richness and depth of both Victorian aesthetics and the artistic sense of Old World Catholicism. The ambiguous destinies of his artist-characters include misunderstandings and disputes, while at the same time they suggest a reconciliation of the conflicting sentiments and transatlantic perspectives of the writer himself.

Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity

Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity PDF

Author: William Peter van den Bercken

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9789042916821

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This volume contains selected papers of a conference in 2004 at Utrecht University on aesthetics as a religious factor in Eastern and Western Christianity. They discuss the role of aesthetics in the presentation and expression of Christian faith in Catholic and Orthodox tradition. During its history Christianity has produced many works of art: church architecture, iconography, painting, music and literary texts. And in Orthodoxy beauty has always been the main form of religious expression, more than verbal presentation of Christian teaching, which is embedded in the aesthetic context of liturgy. In Christian theology beauty has often been seen as a form of divine revelation, related to the mystery of incarnation. The relation between aesthetics and religious belief has acquired new relevance in our secularised world. Today the visible products of Catholic and Orthodox aesthetics are for many people the main means through which they come into contact with Christianity and many people without affinity to religion are attracted by the beauty of Christian art, inside and outside the church. In modern religious studies the experience of beauty is recognised as a factor in explaining religious feelings. The papers are divided in four sections: 1. Comparative aspects of Orthodox and Catholic aesthetics, 2. Religious aesthetics in Russian literary culture, 3. Applied aesthetics in church art, 4. Art-theoretical, ideological and religious-philosophical aspects.