Noise is so often a 'stench in the ear' - an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

Man has always had a weakness for aesthetics, which secretly catch, enchant and seize the attention. Size and colour, form and rhythm affect the desire to say yes or no.
In modern society art is pure and ruthless. But a price has been paid for this freedom: art has become irrelevant.
The opposite of pure art is applied art, which not only must be aesthetically satisfying, but must also fulfil economic, political or religious considerations.

Aesthetic communication explores how organizations use aesthetics. Beginning with an exciting chapter on aesthetic art and applied art it follows with an in-depth analysis of the different fields of organizational aesthetics;
- Image, or the creation of an attractive veil;
- rhetoric, or the use of words to affect people;
- narrative, or the construction of seducing contexts;
- design, or how to impregnate ordinary things with attraction and identity;
- advertisement, or how to insert products in a heavenly world; and
- architecture or how to use buildings to tell about greatness and power.

This philosophical theory of art, addressed to anyone with a serious interest in the arts, has three main objectives: to shift the focus of aesthetics from the question "What is art?" to the question "What is art for?"; to describe the social and historical situation of art today; and to combine aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. A distinctive feature of the book is its argument that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a particularly revealing fashion.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

This book provides a unique, philosophical interpretation of a significant twentieth-century painter - Wassily Kandinsky. Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living."Seeing the Invisible" marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates colour and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life - a force rooted in the corporeity and pathos of all living beings. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.

New arts created in the context of new social realities are impacting our traditional ideas about aesthetics. Art, art markets and aesthetics now interact in ways that demand new forms of thought and revision of old. Cosmopolitan Aesthetics presents the first thorough account of the challenges facing aesthetics today in the light of globalization, introducing the history that underpins them. This is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to better understand 21st century art and aesthetics. Beginning with globalization and the nature of global art markets today, Daniel Herwitz offers new insight into postcolonial aesthetics, colonial legacies, cultural property, the problems of global communication and aesthetic diversity, and the uneasy connection between aesthetics and politics, before providing a crucial grounding in 18th and 19th century aesthetics, with discussion of the three great modern aestheticians David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This is the first English translation of Ranciere's study of the 19th century French poet and critic Stephane Mallarme. In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most popular and influential living philosophers, examines the life and work of the celebrated nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Stephane Mallarme. Ranciere presents Mallarme as neither an aesthete in need of rare essences and unheard-of words, nor the silent and nocturnal thinker of some poem too pure to be written. Mallarme is the contemporary of a republic that is seeking out forms of civic worship to replace the pomp of religions and kings. If his writing is difficult, it is because it complies with a demanding and delicate poetics that is itself responding to an exceptional awareness of the complexity of an historical moment as well as the role that poetry ought to play in it.

This is a fresh, bold study of the emerging field of Sound Art, informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau Ponty and others. "Listening to Noise and Silence" engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salome Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility. A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow. Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. "Listening to Noise and Silence" broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.

Surely you've experienced it before: you're listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine.

Whether it's Beethoven's Choral Symphony or The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony', a bit of blues or a bit of baroque, music has the power to move us. It's a language which we all speak. But why does it have this effect on us? What is going on, emotionally, physically and cognitively when listeners have strong emotional responses to music? What, if anything, do such responses mean? Can they tell us anything about ourselves?

Jeanette Bicknell uses research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to address these questions, ultimately showing us that the reason why some music tends to arouse powerful experiences in listeners is inseparable from the reason why any music matters at all. Musical experience is a social one, and that is fundamental to its attractions and power over us.

Peg Rawes examines a "minor tradition" of aesthetic geometries in ontological philosophy. Developed through Kant's aesthetic subject she explores a trajectory of geometric thinking and geometric figurations--reflective subjects, folds, passages, plenums, envelopes and horizons--in ancient Greek, post-Cartesian and twentieth-century Continental philosophies, through which productive understandings of space and embodies subjectivities are constructed.
Six chapters, explore the construction of these aesthetic geometric methods and figures in a series of "geometric" texts by Kant, Plato, Proclus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bergson, Husserl and Deleuze. In each text, geometry is expressed as a uniquely embodies "aesthetic" activity because each respective geometric method and figure is imbued with aesthetic "sensibility" and geometric "sense" (rather than as disembodies scientific methods). An ontology of aesthetic geometric methods and figures is therefore traced from Kant's Critical writings, back to Plato and Proclus Greek philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz's post-Cartesian philosophies, and forwards to Bergson's "duration" and Husserl's "horizons" towards Deleuze's philosophy of sense.

This book highlights aesthetics as pertaining to the structural component in architectural design. This less explored aspect of architecture is discussed and explains the enduring qualities of ten specific buildings from architectural history to present day due to their structural aesthetics. Based on comprehensive research, a critical analysis is presented of the constraints and other influences on architectural and structural design, such as culture, patronage, geometry, available resources and technologies.

If Cleopatra's nose had been half an inch longer, neither Caesar nor Mark Anthony would have fallen in love with her. It: The History of Human Beauty treats outstanding physical attractiveness as a quality or possession, comparable to power, intelligence, strength, wealth, education or family, that had a marked effect on history. Beauty in men and women opened opportunities to its possessors not available to the ordinary looking or ugly. While in the past women have had to use the lure of sex to achieve power or wealth, epitomized by royal mistresses or the Grandes Horizontales of the nineteenth century, modern film stars (male and female) can acquire great wealth simply by the use of their images, while attractiveness on television is an essential modern qualification for power, as shown by Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair.

An abrupt break in the more conventional modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century. However, as Jed Rasula's alternative history shows, modernist aesthetics owe a significant debt to techniques and styles pioneered and established throughout the nineteenth century. An ambitious inter-arts exploration of patterns between one generation and another form the through-line of History of a Shiver: the backdrop of Wagner's epic nineteenth-century operas illuminates the music of Arnold Schoenberg and the Viennese School, in addition to literary works by Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Ezra Pound; the collodion glass plates deployed by Victorian photographers reveal the debt of Dada and Man Ray's innovative photograms to an era associated with realism; the brass bands conducted by John Philip Sousa in the 1880s and 1890s form a blueprint for instrumentation that gave rise to jazz; and the French symbolist verse of Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine inspire the surrealist artworks of Salvador Dali. In addition to these connections, Rasula's book similarly considers phenomena in theatre, sculpture, and the "visual music" of figures like Thomas Wilfrid and Wassily Kandinsky. Taken together, the chapters of History of a Shiver emphasize the importance of inter-collaboration and influence in an artistic period when artfroms are traditionally isolated from one another and primarily celebrated for severing ties with the past.

This collection on the Standard of Taste offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. This much needed volume on David Hume will enrich scholars across all levels of university study and research.

In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Zizek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will be of value to all who take an interest in cultural modernity-indeed, all who recognize that "modernity" was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies

Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
Series Editor: Dr Elinor Shaffer: Institute of Germanic Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Contributors: Stefano Evangelista, University of Bristol Stephen Bann, University of Bristol Benedetta Bini, University of Tuscia Maurizio Ascari, University of Bologna Elisa Bizzotto, University of Venice-Ca'Foscari Emily Eells, University of Paris X-Nanterre Benedicte Coste, Stendhal University, Grenoble Wolfgang Iser Ulrike Stamm, Berlin Martina Lauster, University of Exeter Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak, Eotvos University, Budapest Martin Prochazka, Charles University, Prague Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Maria Teresa Malafaia, University of Lisbon Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, University of Oporto Jacqueline Hurtley, University of Barcelona