In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime, Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame, a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits, Raymond contends, test the parameters of the gaze, a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics, and the sublime.

As one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Michel Foucault's reputation today rests on his political philosophy in relation to the contemporary subject in a neo-liberal and globalized society. This book offers insight into the role of the arts in Foucault's thought as a means to better understanding his contribution to larger debates concerning contemporary existence. Visual culture, literary, film and performance studies have all engaged with Foucauldian theories, but a full examination of Foucault's significance for aesthetic discourse has been lacking until now. This book argues that Foucault's particular approach to philosophy as a way of thinking the self through the work of art provides significant grounds for rethinking his impact today. The volume moves across as many disciplinary boundaries as Foucault himself did, demonstrating the value of Foucault's approach to aesthetic discourse for our understanding of how the arts and humanities reflect upon contemporary existence in a globalized society.

The Making and Influence of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang uses a complete biography of Robert E. Burns, a World War I veteran who was coerced into taking part in a petty crime in Atlanta, Georgia. Sentenced to a harsh sentence on a barbaric chain gang, he twice escaped and remained on the run for decades, aided only by his minister-poet brother, Vincent G. Burns. Their collaborative book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! led to Darryl F. Zanuck and Mervyn Leroy's hard-hitting film adaptation released by Warner Bros. in 1932. The book simultaneously traces the making and influence of the film and the Burns brothers' continuing efforts to obtain a pardon, which never came. A truly unique volume, it exposes a shameful miscarriage of justice, while also covering the powerful Warner Bros. film, starring Paul Muni as Robert Burns, supported by Glenda Farrell, Allen Jenkins, Preston Foster, and many other members of the Warners' ""stock company,"" and its imitators that followed over the coming decades.

Comparative aesthetics is the branch of philosophy which compares the aesthetic concepts and practices of different cultures. The way in which cultures conceive of the aesthetic dimension of life in general and art in particular is revelatory of profound attitudes and beliefs which themselves make up an important part of the culture in question. This anthology of essays by internationally recognised scholars in this field brings into one volume some of the most important research in comparative aesthetics, from classic early essays to previously unpublished contemporary pieces. Ranging across cultures and time periods as diverse as ancient Greece, India and China and the modern West and Japan, the essays reveal both similarities and deep differences between the aesthetic traditions concerned. In the course of these expositions and comparisons there emerges the general conclusion that no culture can be fully grasped if its aesthetic ideas are not understood.

Everyone is already painfully aware of our predicament - ecological extinctions, dwindling fossil fuel reserves and economic chaos. The solutions are less obvious, despite the many opportunities that surround us. We have never had more access to resources, knowledge and technology but this is not the problem. What we lack most is creative thinking, fuelled by collective optimism. In a pragmatic world run by careerist experts this is hardly surprising. As voters and consumers we are trained to choose and complain, but not how to envisage what we really, really want. How can we design a better world unless we revive the art of dreaming? For without dreams we are lost. Perhaps it should be the duty of all citizens to imagine alternative futures; in effect, to think more like designers. After all, designers have always been dreamers, and have often found ways to realize their dreams. Design for Micro-Utopias does not advocate a single, monolithic Utopia. Rather, it invites readers to embrace a more pluralized and mercurial version of Thomas More's famous 1516 novel of the same name. It therefore encourages the proliferation of many 'micro-utopias' rather than one 'Utopia'. This requires a less negative, critical and rational approach. Referencing a wide range of philosophical thinking from Aristotle to the present day, western and eastern spiritual ideals, and scientific, biological and systems theory, John Wood offers remedies for our excessively individualistic, mechanistic and disconnected thinking, and asks whether a metadesign approach might bring about a new mode of governance. This is a daring idea. Ultimately, he reminds us that if we believe that we will never be able to design miracles we make it more likely that this is so. The first step is to turn the 'impossible' into the 'thinkable'.

Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things offers an original interpretation and vigorous defense of Theodor Adorno's idea of philosophy as the practice of what Roger Foster calls "philosophical modernism." Adorno's philosophical writings, from the early 1930s to the mature works of the late 1960s, are deeply informed by a distinctively modernist vision of human experience. This book seeks to establish that Adorno's unique and lasting contribution to philosophy consists in his sustained and rigorous development of this modernist vision into an encompassing practice of philosophical interpretation. The essential features of this vision can be discerned in all of Adorno's major writings in philosophy, social theory, and aesthetics. Its defining element is the idea of a pattern underlying ordinary experience, which, although not directly accessible, can be disclosed by the reconstructive work of philosophical or literary language. This vision, Foster argues, can be discerned in the major works of literary modernism (including Woolf, Proust, and Musil) as well as in the interpretive technique of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud. The importance of Adorno's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy can only be fully appreciated by understanding how he developed this vision into an overarching practice of philosophical interpretation that furnished a coherent and profound response to the decay of experience afflicting late-modern societies. In this book, Foster expounds that interpretive practice, exploring its ramifications and, in particular, its relation with literary modernism, and places it in critical dialogue with alternative philosophical responses.

In The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach - the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content - to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity - in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself.

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the "present of writing," as he put it. Simon's seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically-that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon's works-in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon's vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The properties that have made human beings special among animals living in the terrestrial biosphere do not derive entirely from their biological-genetic evolution, but also stem from their interaction with the environment, in its culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. This, in turn, becomes possible thanks to the human ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and perspectives to new generations.

This book is the culmination of many years of research on Japanese aesthetics by David and Michiko Young, authors of The Art of the Japanese Garden and The Art of Japanese Architecture (Tuttle Publishing). The book contains more than 200 color photographs on a variety of topics pertaining to Japanese art and culture. There are two major aesthetic traditions in Japan --a Restrained Tradition and an Exuberant Tradition. In phenomena as diverse as art, architecture, gardens, clothing, the objects people use and interior decor, the influence of both traditions can be seen. Instead of competing with each other, these two traditions are opposite ends of a continuum on which people move back and forth between restraint and exuberance in the course of their daily lives, depending upon the circumstances. This movement is not arbitrary but governed by principles that go to the core of Japanese culture. The goal of this book is to provide a better understanding of these basic principles. An important theme throughout the book is that Japan is a highly structured society in which people value but seldom have the opportunity to express spontaneity in art and everyday life. True spontaneity is achieved only when an art form is totally mastered so that it flows freely without thought. This kind of spontaneity is seen in children's art, much of the art of Zen Buddhism or absorption in a hobby, sport or music. Most of the time, individuals seek escape from the restrictions of everyday life in fantasy, as evidenced by the popularity of manga and the great diversity of after-hours entertainment in Japan. Sometimes, however, they turn to the values incorporated in the concept of SHIBUSA, an important aesthetic concept in Japan. SHIBUSA attempts to find a compromise between spontaneity and a high level of taste. SHIBUI aesthetics, which favor values such as austerity, asymmetry and subdued colors, is toward the restrained end of the Restraint-Exuberance Continuum. At the same time, however, it represents what we have called "spontaneity of effect," creating an atmosphere that appears to be relaxed and spontaneous, even if it is not truly spontaneous. We believe that the concept of SHIBUSA is a major contribution of Japan to the rest of the world.

Arguing that we ought to look to psychedelic aesthetics of the 1960s in relation to current crises in liberal democracy, this book emphasizes the intersection of European thought and the psychedelic. The first half of the book focuses on philosophical influences of Herbert Marcuse and Antonin Artaud, while the second half shifts toward literary and theoretical influences of Aldous Huxley on psychedelic aesthetics. Framed within an emergent discourse of political theology, it suggests that taking a postsecular approach to psychedelic aesthetics helps us understand deeper connections between aesthetics and politics.

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, " Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, "Michel Henry""presents a statue as more than a static entity. A statue for Serres is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Through his prescient analysis of statues and how we create and respond to art, Henry demonstrates how sacrificial art founded society and through this reflects on the centrality of death and the dead body to the human condition.Approaching the problem from multiple angles, Serres comments on Verne's "Around the Moon," Rodin's "The Gates of Hell," the Eiffel Tower, cemeteries, short stories by Maupassant, fables by La Fontaine, clothing and the paintings of Carpaccio, the Challenger disaster and Baal. Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, "Statues" does not follow a linear time sequence but rather plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, "Statues" contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

Christopher Janaway presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's most studied work, On the Genealogy of Morality, and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. Arguing that Nietzsche's goal is to pursue psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, Beyond Selflessness differs from other books on Nietzsche in that it emphasizes the significance of his rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly naturalist, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. In contrast to his opponents, Schopenhauer and Paul Ree, who both account for morality in terms of selflessness, Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. In addition to examining how Nietzsche's "perspectivism" holds that one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of one's feelings as possible to speak about it, Janaway shows that Nietzsche seeks to enable us to "feel differently": his provocation of the reader's affects helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepare the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life (as tested by the thought of eternal return) and the self-satisfaction to be attainedby "giving style to one's character."

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting 'crisis of consciousness' in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time. The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. Contributors: Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Loewy, Jean-Michel Rabate, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards.

Pictorial representation is one of the core questions in aesthetics and philosophy of art. What is a picture? How do pictures represent things? This collection of specially commissioned chapters examines the influential thesis that the core of pictorial representation is not resemblance but 'seeing-in', in particular as found in the work of Richard Wollheim. We can see a passing cloud as a rabbit, but we also see a rabbit in the clouds. 'Seeing-in' is an imaginative act of the kind employed by Leonardo's pupils when he told them to see what they could - for example, battle scenes - in a wall of cracked plaster. This collection examines the idea of 'seeing-in' as it appears primarily in the work of Wollheim but also its origins in the work of Wittgenstein. An international roster of contributors examine topics such as the contrast between seeing-in and seeing-as; whether or in what sense Wollheim can be thought of as borrowing from Wittgenstein; the idea that all perception is conceptual or propositional; the metaphor of figure and ground and its relation to the notion of 'two-foldedness'; the importance in art of emotion and the imagination. Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in is essential reading for students and scholars of aesthetics and philosophy of art, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind and art theory.

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture explores the potential links between terror and aesthetics in modern Western society, specifically the affinity between terrorism and the possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of terrorist phenomena or events. But can we actually have an aesthetic appreciation of terror or terrorism? And if we can, is it ethical or legitimate? Emmanouil Aretoulakis proposes that Western spectators and subjects from the eighteenth century onwards have always felt, unconsciously or not, a certain kind of fascination or even exhilaration before scenes of tragedy and natural or manmade disaster. Owing to their immorality, such "forbidden" feelings go unacknowledged. It would definitely be callous as well as politically incorrect to acknowledge the existence of aesthetics in witnessing or representing human misery. Still, as Aretoulakis insists, our aesthetic faculties or even our appreciation of the beautiful are already inherent in how we view, appraise, and pass judgment upon phenomena of terrorism and disaster. Paradoxically, such a "forbidden aesthetics" is ethical despite its utter immorality.

The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre's The Wall and Other Stories: Stories of Bad Faith presents a philosophical analysis of all five stories in Sartre's short-story collection. Kevin W. Sweeney argues that each of the five stories has its own philosophical idea or problem that serves as the context for the narrative. Sartre constructs each story as a reply to the philosophical issue in the context and as support for his position on that issue. In the opening story, "The Wall," Sartre uses the Constant-Kant debate to support his view that the story's protagonist is responsible for his ally's death. "The Room" presents in narrative form Sartre's criticism that the Freudian Censor is acting in bad faith. In "Erostratus," Sartre opposes Descartes's claim in his "hats and coats" example that we recognize the humanity of others by using our reason. In "Intimacy," Sartre again opposes a Cartesian position, this time the view that our feelings reveal our emotions. Sartre counters that Cartesian view by showing that the two women in the story act in bad faith because they do not distinguish their feelings from their emotions. The last story, "The Childhood of a Leader," shows how the protagonist acts in bad faith in trying to resolve the question of who he is by appealing to the view that one's roots in nature can provide one with a substantial identity. The stories are unified by showing the characters in all five narratives engaged in different acts of bad faith. The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre's The Wall and Other Stories is written for scholars interested in Jean-Paul Sartre's early literary and philosophical work, as well as for students interested in Sartre and twentieth-century French literature.

Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art's defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people's lives lived in an "audit culture", a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people's work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the "value" they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.

This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four contemporary artists from different countries, working with different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy uses her poetic language to make room for people's desires; her fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses references to Chinese history to give consistency to its 'economic miracle'. Finally, Burial's electronic music is firmly rooted in a living, breathing London; built to create a sound that is entirely new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to themes and political concepts that are larger than their own domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.

What is love? What is it to be loved? Can we trust love? Is it overrated? These are just some of the questions Tony Milligan pursues in his novel exploration of a subject that has occupied philosophers since the time of Plato. Tackling the mood of pessimism about the nature of love that reaches back through Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, he examines the links between love and grief, love and nature, and between love of others and loving oneself. We love too few things in the world, Milligan concludes, adding that we need to be loved too, to appreciate our own value and the worth of life itself.

In What Is Film?, Julie N. Books critically evaluates three philosophical doctrines of film realism (transparency, illusionism, and perceptual realism) and defends her view that films are creative works of art. By examining contemporary films, such as computer-animated films and films with computer-generated images, Dr. Books shows how films are creative works of art, thereby undermining the long-held view that films are slavish recordings of reality. This book is ideal for academics and courses on the philosophy of film, film theory, film history, filmmaking, metaphysics, and the philosophy of art.