Eroticizing Aesthetics

Eroticizing Aesthetics PDF

Author: Tim Themi

Publisher: Global Aesthetic Research

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781538147825

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Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics and how this can invoke the erotic process.

Eroticizing Aesthetics

Eroticizing Aesthetics PDF

Author: Tim Themi

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1538147831

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Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Bataille’s view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacan’s of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Bataille’s many interventions into the history of aesthetics — from his confrontations with Breton’s surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux — radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the “jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression” in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.

The Space of Sex

The Space of Sex PDF

Author: Shelton Waldrep

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1501333062

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As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scène of contemporary moving imagery. Opening The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole. The Space of Sex's second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schrader's The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stone's Savages (2012), Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon (2013). Each of these mainstream or independent movies, and several more, are examined for the ways they have attempted to absorb pornography, if not the pornography industry specifically, into their plot. According to Waldrep, the utopian elements of seventies porn get reprocessed in a complex way in the twenty-first century as both a utopian impulse-the desire to have sex on the screen, to re-eroticize sex as something positive and lacking in shame-with a mixed feeling about pornography itself, with an industry that can be seen in a dystopian light. In other words, sex, in our contemporary world, still does not come without compromise.

Aesthetic Sexuality

Aesthetic Sexuality PDF

Author: Romana Byrne

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-11-28

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1441183582

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To understand why the concept of aesthetic sexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality. Arguing against Foucault's assertions that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture while ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, Byrne suggests that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what she calls aesthetic sexuality'. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, sexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic sexuality, value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality's raison d'être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication.

Baumgarten's Aesthetics

Baumgarten's Aesthetics PDF

Author: J. Colin McQuillan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-07-07

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1538146266

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The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced “aesthetics” as a new science in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) and developed this new part of philosophy in a series of later works, culminating in his unfinished Aesthetics (1750/1758). This volume is the first collection of essays in the English language devoted to Baumgarten’s aesthetics. The essays highlight the distinguishing features of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, situate it in its historical context, document its reception, and examine its contributions to contemporary philosophy.

The Aesthetics of Pornography

The Aesthetics of Pornography PDF

Author: Peter Michelson

Publisher:

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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Presents the argument that pornography is a distinctive literary genre, providing insight into man's demonic side.

Ars Erotica

Ars Erotica PDF

Author: Richard Shusterman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1009028227

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The term ars erotica refers to the styles and techniques of lovemaking with the honorific title of art. But in what sense are these practices artistic and how do they contribute to the aesthetics and ethics of self-cultivation in the art of living? In this book, Richard Shusterman offers a critical, comparative analysis of the erotic theories proposed by the most influential premodern cultural traditions that shaped our contemporary world. Beginning with ancient Greece, whose god of desiring love gave eroticism its name, Shusterman examines the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition and the classical erotic theories of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese cultures, before concluding with medieval and Renaissance Europe. His exploration of their errors and insights shows how we could improve the quality of life and love today. By using the engine of eros to cultivate qualities of sensitivity, grace, skill, and self-mastery, we can reimagine a richer, more positive vision of sex education.

Speaking the Unspeakable

Speaking the Unspeakable PDF

Author: Peter Michelson

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780791412244

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This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, “Reage,” Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene —in the sense of speaking the unspeakable— is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.

Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography

Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography PDF

Author: H. Maes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1137367938

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What happens when art and pornography meet? By providing a plurality of disciplinary approaches and theoretical perspectives this essay collection will give the reader a fuller and deeper understanding of the commonalities and frictions between artistic and pornographic representations.

What Art Does

What Art Does PDF

Author: Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1538167336

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The question of what and how artworks mean things is conventionally satisfied by appealing to literature from either philosophy of art or philosophy of language. This book offers an alternative by positioning art as a type of meaning-making tool whose function can only be understood through the application of the philosophy of technology.