Download or read book The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic written by Mario Perniola and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola puts forth the radical argument that we are shifting away from organic sexuality, based on desire and pleasure, and moving towards a more neutral inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, age or form. Perniola takes the reader on a tour of Western philosophy, from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre, to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the aesthetic world around us. In order to realize the sex appeal of the inorganic Perniola argues that we must become 'things that feel', we must think ourselves closer to the inorganic, creating an alliance between senses and things. Examples from contemporary culture that, for Perniola, are emblems of the sex appeal of the inorganic, include progressive rock music, fashion, deconstructive architecture and the novels of Georges Perec.
Download or read book The Arcades Project written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 1100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project written by Beatrice Hanssen and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-07-27 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the nature of collecting, the anatomy of melancholy, the flâneur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, Benjamin's relation to Baudelaire, the practice of history-writing, and modernity and architecture. Contributors include Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Culler, Brigid Doherty, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, and Irving Wohlfarth
Download or read book 20th Century Aesthetics written by Mario Perniola and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of Italy's leading contemporary thinkers and available in English for the first time, this book surveys the key themes in Continental aesthetics.
Download or read book Suspensions of Perception written by Jonathan Crary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle. Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices. Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Mario Perniola written by Enea Bianchi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enea Bianchi provides the first in-depth introduction to the pioneering thought of 20th-century Italian philosopher, Mario Perniola. Examining Perniola's entire oeuvre, this book also pushes his philosophy into new directions by investigating the connection between his aesthetics and the philosophical underpinnings of dandyism. Rich in influences, from ancient Stoicism to Roman ritualism, Baroque literature and avant-garde revolutionary movements, Perniola's philosophy is wide-ranging. This book highlights and explores numerous notions pivotal to understanding Perniola's thought, including: the “sex appeal of the inorganic”, the “enigma”, “strategic beauty” and the “artistic shadow”. Combining these concepts with three exemplar dandies – George Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde – Bianchi demonstrates not only the close relationship between their principles and Perniola's aesthetics, but their shared, and timely, opposition to the status quo. A dandy philosophy emerges, which challenges the individual not only to refute the ongoing commodification of tastes, emotions and lifestyles, but also to develop a welcoming and loving disposition with respect to the enigma of our prismatic world.
Download or read book What Color Is the Sacred written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum,this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.
Download or read book Selected Writings 1935 1938 written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising more than 65 pieces - journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, and fragments - this volume shows the range of Walter Benjamin's writing. His topics here include poetry, fiction, drama, history, religion, love, violence, morality and mythology.
Download or read book Abstract Sex written by Luciana Parisi and published by Continuum. This book was released on 2004 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.
Download or read book Le Deuxi me Sexe written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1989 with total page 791 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.
Download or read book Progresses in Artificial Intelligence and Neural Systems written by Anna Esposito and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the current advances in artificial intelligence and neural nets. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have shown great capabilities in modelling, prediction and recognition tasks supporting human–machine interaction. At the same time, the issue of emotion has gained increasing attention due to its relevance in achieving human-like interaction with machines. The real challenge is taking advantage of the emotional characterization of humans’ interactions to make computers interfacing with them emotionally and socially credible. The book assesses how and to what extent current sophisticated computational intelligence tools might support the multidisciplinary research on the characterization of appropriate system reactions to human emotions and expressions in interactive scenarios. Discussing the latest recent research trends, innovative approaches and future challenges in AI from interdisciplinary perspectives, it is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in academia and industry.
Download or read book Rethinking Greek Religion written by Julia Kindt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who marched in religious processions and why? How were blood sacrifice and communal feasting related to identities in the ancient Greek city? With questions such as these, current scholarship aims to demonstrate the ways in which religion maps on to the socio-political structures of the Greek polis ('polis religion'). In this book Dr Kindt explores a more comprehensive conception of ancient Greek religion beyond this traditional paradigm. Comparative in method and outlook, the book invites its readers to embark on an interdisciplinary journey touching upon such diverse topics as religious belief, personal religion, magic and theology. Specific examples include the transformation of tyrant property into ritual objects, the cultural practice of setting up dedications at Olympia, and a man attempting to make love to Praxiteles' famous statue of Aphrodite. The book will be valuable for all students and scholars seeking to understand the complex phenomenon of ancient Greek religion.
Download or read book Poetics of Breathing written by Stefanie Heine and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breathing and its rhythms—liminal, syncopal, and usually inconspicuous—have become a core poetic compositional principle in modern literature. Examining moments when breath's punctuations, cessations, inhalations, or exhalations operate at the limits of meaningful speech, Stefanie Heine explores how literary texts reflect their own mediality, production, and reception in alluding to and incorporating pneumatic rhythms, respiratory sound, and silent pauses. Through close readings of works by a series of pairs—Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Robert Musil and Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath; and Paul Celan and Herta Müller—Poetics of Breathing suggests that each offers a different conception of literary or poetic breath as a precondition of writing. Presenting a challenge to historical and contemporary discourses that tie breath to the transcendent and the natural, Heine traces a decoupling of breath from its traditional association with life, and asks what literature might lie beyond.
Download or read book The Drowned Muse written by Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide", has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.
Download or read book The Cultural Life of Money written by Isabel Capeloa Gil and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum written by Giles Whiteley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause celebre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley's groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept of the simulacrum to resituate Wilde's work in relation to both his precursors and his contemporaries, Whiteley's study reads Wilde through Deleuze and postmodern philosophical commentary on the simulacrum. In a series of striking juxtapositions, Whiteley challenges us to rethink both Oscar Wilde's aesthetics and his philosophy, to take seriously both the man and the mask. His philosophy of masks is revealed to figure a truth of a different kind - the simulacra through which Wilde begins to develop and formulate a mature philosophy that constitutes an ethics of joy.
Download or read book Extreme Beauty written by James Swearingen and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we speak of "beauty"? What do we experience? Beauty is no longer the human experience of the harmonious object; today an aesthetics of difference has revolutionised our ways of seeing the beautiful. Now, we live in a time of "extreme beauty." Extreme Beauty explores art, literature, politics, and philosophy in order to illuminate how the concept and experience of beauty has changed. The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, fascism and the consumption of the flesh, postcolonialism and imagination to Derrida and the glory and gift of death.
