Download or read book Adorno s Rhinoceros written by Antonia Hofstätter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his work, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno repeatedly invokes the rhinoceros. Taking its cue from one of these passages in Aesthetic Theory, 'So a rhinoceros, the mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros', this book explores the life of this animal in Adorno's texts, and articulates the nuanced interconnections between art, nature and critique in his thought. By thus illuminating key elements of Adorno's work, this volume reveals the invaluable contributions that this 'classical' thinker can make to our current reflections on the various pressing natural and political crises of our times.
Download or read book Adorno written by Stefan Müller-Doohm and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
Download or read book Exemplarity and Singularity written by Michele Lowrie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book pursues a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law – genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking – as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular – exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.
Download or read book Critical Theory and Animal Liberation written by John Sanbonmatsu and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-01-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or "left" tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of "animal rights," the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social power, mass violence, and domination, from capitalism and patriarchy to genocide, fascism, and ecocide. Contributors include well-known writers in the field as well as scholars in other areas writing on animals for the first time. Among other things, the authors apply Freud's theory of repression to our relationship to the animal, debunk the "Locavore" movement, expose the sexism of the animal defense movement, and point the way toward a new transformative politics that would encompass the human and animal alike.
Download or read book Adorno s Critique of Political Economy written by Dirk Braunstein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprehensively refutes the assumption that Adorno’s references to Marx represent a relic from an early stage of his theoretical development. Reconstructing Adorno’s own critique of political economy, it elevates him from cultural critic to highly original social theorist.
Download or read book Wreading written by Jed Rasula and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jed Rasula is a preeminent scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. He's also a gifted writer-his recent books have won praise for their entertaining, clear prose in addition to their scholarship. He is also an alumnus of UAP's distinguished Modern and Contemporary Poetics series, which published his Syncopations fifteen years ago. Rasula returns to the MCP series with Wreading, A collection of essays, interviews and occasional writings that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity. One of the referees likened Wreading to a "victory lap, but one that sets its own further record in the taking." This is a collection of highlights from Rasula's shorter critical pieces, but also a carefully assembled and revised intellectual autobiography. Wreading consists of two parts: an assortment of Rasula's solo criticism, and selected interviews and conversations with other critics and scholars (Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, Tony Tost, Mike Chasar, Joel Bettridge, and Ming-Qian Ma). The collection opens with a trio of essays that complicate the idea of a "poet." By interrogating the selection of poets for anthologies in the 20th century, Rasula identifies a host of "forgotten" poets, once prominent but now forgotten. Another essay on the state of the poetry anthology reveals how much influence literary gatekeepers have, and what a reimagination of the anthology form could make possible. In subsequent chapters, Rasula finds surprising overlap between Dada and Ralph Waldo Emerson, charts the deep links between image and poetic inspiration, and reckons with Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, a UAP classic. In the book's second half, Rasula engages in detailed conversations with a roster of fellow critics. Their exchanges confront ecopoetics, the corporate university, the sheer volume of contemporary poetry, and more. This substantial set of dialogues gives readers a glimpse inside a master critic's deeply informed critical practice, and lists his intellectual touchstones. The balance between essay and interview achieves a distillation of Rasula's long-established idea of "wreading." In his original use, the term denotes how any act of criticism inherently adds to the body of writing that it purports to read- how Rasula "couldn't help but participate" in his favorite poems. In this latest form, Wreading captures a critical perception that sparks insight and imagination, no matter what it sees"--
Download or read book Aesthetics of Negativity written by William S. Allen and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity. In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.
Download or read book The Thin Red Line written by David Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-10-27 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thin Red Line raises important philosophical questions, ranging from the existential and phenomenological to the artistic and technical. This is the first book to explore and address the philosophical aspects of Malick’s film.
Download or read book The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium written by Juan Pimentel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One animal left India in 1515, caged in the hold of a Portuguese ship, and sailed around Africa to Lisbon—the first of its species to see Europe for more than a thousand years. The other crossed the Atlantic from South America to Madrid in 1789, its huge fossilized bones packed in crates, its species unknown. How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to these two mysterious beasts—a rhinoceros, known only from ancient texts, and a nameless monster? As Juan Pimentel explains, the reactions reflect deep intellectual changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to shape our understanding of the natural world. We know the rhinoceros today as “Dürer’s Rhinoceros,” after the German artist’s iconic woodcut. His portrait was inaccurate—Dürer never saw the beast and relied on conjecture, aided by a sketch from Lisbon. But the influence of his extraordinary work reflected a steady move away from ancient authority to the dissemination in print of new ideas and images. By the time the megatherium arrived in Spain, that movement had transformed science. When published drawings found their way to Paris, the great zoologist Georges Cuvier correctly deduced that the massive bones must have belonged to an extinct giant sloth. It was a pivotal moment in the discovery of the prehistoric world. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium offers a penetrating account of two remarkable episodes in the cultural history of science and is itself a vivid example of the scientific imagination at work.
Download or read book Minima Moralia written by Theodor Adorno and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature." Susan Sontag
Download or read book The Earwig s Tail written by May R. Berenbaum and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Middle Ages, enormously popular bestiaries presented people with descriptions of rare and unusual animals, typically paired with a moral or religious lesson. The real and the imaginary blended seamlessly in these books—at the time, the existence of a rhinoceros was as credible as a unicorn or dragon. Although audiences now scoff at the impossibility of mythological beasts, there remains an extraordinary willingness to suspend skepticism and believe wild stories about nature, particularly about insects and their relatives in the Phylum Arthropoda. In The Earwig’s Tail, entomologist May Berenbaum and illustrator Jay Hosler draw on the powerful cultural symbols of these antiquated books to create a beautiful and witty bestiary of the insect world. Berenbaum’s compendium of tales is an alphabetical tour of modern myths that humorously illuminates aerodynamically unsound bees, ear-boring earwigs, and libido-enhancing Spanish flies. She tracks down the germ of scientific truth that inspires each insect urban legend and shares some wild biological lessons, which, because of the amazing nature of the insect world, can be more fantastic than even the mythic misperceptions.
Download or read book Traditions of Systems Theory written by Darrell Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ‘systems theory’ is used to characterize a set of disparate yet related approaches to fields as varied as information theory, cybernetics, biology, sociology, history, literature, and philosophy. What unites each of these traditions of systems theory is a shared focus on general features of systems and their fundamental importance for diverse areas of life. Yet there are considerable differences among these traditions, and each tradition has developed its own methodologies, journals, and forms of anaylsis. This book explores this terrain and provides an overview of and guide to the traditions of systems theory in their considerable variety. The book draws attention to the traditions of systems theory in their historical development, especially as related to the humanities and social sciences, and shows how from these traditions various contemporary developments have ensued. It provides a guide for strains of thought that are key to understanding 20th century intellectual life in many areas.
Download or read book Dialectic of Enlightenment written by Max Horkheimer and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1993 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>
Download or read book Ad vivum written by Thomas Balfe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ad vivum and its cognates al vivo, au vif, nach dem Leben and naer het leven have been applied since the thirteenth century to depictions designated as from, to or after (the) life. This book explores the issues raised by this vocabulary and related terminology with reference to visual materials produced and used in Europe before 1800, including portraiture, botanical, zoological, medical and topographical images, images of novel and newly discovered phenomena, and likenesses created through direct contact with the object being depicted. The designation ad vivum was not restricted to depictions made directly after the living model, and was often used to advertise the claim of an image to be a faithful likeness or a bearer of reliable information. Viewed as an assertion of accuracy or truth, ad vivum raises a number of fundamental questions in the area of early modern epistemology – questions about the value and prestige of visual and/or physical contiguity between image and original, about the kinds of information which were thought important and dependably transmissible in material form, and about the roles of the artist in that transmission. The recent interest of historians of early modern art in how value and meaning are produced and reproduced by visual materials which do not conform to the definition of art as unique invention, and of historians of science and of art in the visualisation of knowledge, has placed the questions surrounding ad vivum at the centre of their common concerns. Contributors: Thomas Balfe, José Beltrán, Carla Benzan, Eleanor Chan, Robert Felfe, Mechthild Fend, Sachiko Kusukawa, Pieter Martens, Richard Mulholland, Noa Turel, Joanna Woodall, and Daan Van Heesch.
Download or read book A Companion to Adorno written by Peter E. Gordon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.
Download or read book Biological Diversity written by Louise E. Buck and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2001-06-21 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world of wide pendulum swings regarding management policies for protected areas, particularly as they affect the involvement of local people in management. Such swings can be polarizing and halt on-the-ground progress. There is a need to find ways to protect biodiversity while creating common ground and building management capacity thr
Download or read book Cinema and Experience written by Miriam Hansen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.
