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What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death.
While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has
always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the
most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a
global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social
struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant
political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for
traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements
on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the
global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of
equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to
engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of
this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and
Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution,
the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and
civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing
together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over
centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics
which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their
predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion
of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its
material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not –
draw from this. This concise and magisterial history of the
Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of
equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that
has shaped the modern world.
What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death.
While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has
always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the
most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a
global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social
struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant
political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for
traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements
on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the
global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of
equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to
engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of
this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and
Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution,
the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and
civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing
together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over
centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics
which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their
predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion
of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its
material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not –
draw from this. This concise and magisterial history of the
Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of
equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that
has shaped the modern world.
This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of
hearing maps out a "sonorous archipelago"-a heterogeneous set of
shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and
discourse. Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant
spaces, both an "organ of fear" and an echo chamber of anticipated
pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection
and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of
hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same
philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds,
Francois J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible
heterogeneity of "sound," navigating between the physical models
constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording
technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From
primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and
sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound
speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon
drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno,
and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and
Raudive. Stringent critiques of the "soundscape" and "reduced
listening" demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always
partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective
fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and
convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities.
Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound
"itself," nor an "ocean of sound" in which we might lose ourselves,
but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago-a heterogeneous set of
shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the
vicissitudes of desire and discourse.
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Dialectic of Pop (Paperback)
Agnes Gayraud, Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, Nina Power
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R670
Discovery Miles 6 700
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich,
self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major
philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnes Gayraud explores all
the paradoxes of pop-its inauthentic authenticity, its mass
production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive
novelty, its precision engineering of seduction-and calls for pop
(in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded
music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art
form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing
engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light
popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the
pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century,
from Hillbilly to Beyonce, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable
from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and
intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts
notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura
and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far
from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated
by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises
its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity,
and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop
sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting
from the encounter between industrial production and the human
predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first
century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological
mediations.
This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation
between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France today:
Alain Badiou and the author, Francois Laruelle. At face value, the
two have much in common: both espouse a position of absolute
immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science;
and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the
parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and
Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and
explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's
entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one science:
mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event
and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his
own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In
turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as
a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual
enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of
'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.
A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an
investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern
technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a
renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of
modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely
accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only
one-originally Greek-type of technics has been an obstacle to any
original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.
Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese
philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's
challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and
technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of
the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on
Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of
modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western
readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan,
and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the
question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized
in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for
Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi
transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological
modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology
in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of
traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original
investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese
thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical
questioning of globalized technics.
Francois Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or
"nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of
Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion,
science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the
rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic
and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose
"crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is
not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the
Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic
man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic
messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting
quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of
the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is
God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born.
Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism
alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties
religion to the human experience and the lived world.
A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War
cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the
models of knowledge that they imply. If the term "Cold World"
describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and
the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced
during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between
nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World
globalization, where our collective consciousness is overtaken by a
flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the
incomputability of this alien yet constructed world. But what is
the crime scene of the Cold World? How is it to be decrypted? Where
are its discontinuities, what is the nature of its violence? This
is to say, what is our place in this alien world and how do we even
compute the "we" that we describe ourselves to be? Given the
existential uncertainty unleashed for those who lived through the
Cold War, but whose repercussions are in many ways amplified,
relayed, and replayed in a new form for those who must now survive
what has been called the "Cold World"-that of technological
subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and
ecological crisis-this terrain comprises an experiential and
experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage in
myriad forms, a fundamental question: "What will we of make of
ourselves?" Cold War/Cold World documents a research project in
progress that attempts to evaluate and respond to this fundamental
shock to the system, examining attempts to render knowable,
representable, or figurable the looming threats of both Cold War
and Cold World-the common denominator being a distressed attempt to
inquire into the dynamics of a real that seems in excess over
understanding and the means of politics traditionally conceived;
and a concomitant temptation to abandon any intelligent collective
engagement in favour of a pragmatics that limits itself to
wrestling with local contingencies, or an aesthetics mesmerised by
a global sublime.
Francois Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or
"nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of
Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion,
science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the
rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic
and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose
"crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is
not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the
Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic
man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic
messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting
quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of
the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is
God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born.
Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism
alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties
religion to the human experience and the lived world.
Explorations of Deleuze's work by pioneering thinkers from
philosophy, aesthetics, music, and architecture. A collection of
explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers
in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music, and architecture.
The volume also includes a previously untranslated early text by
Deleuze and a short interview, along with a fascinating piece of
vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences.
The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of
perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does
his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from
other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the
apparently disparate threads of his work to be "integrated"-What is
the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the
conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what
are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical
concepts "signed Deleuze" converge? As an annex to the second
volume of Collapse, this volume also include a full transcript of
the workshop on "Speculative Realism" held in London in 2007.
The first published work to explore the new philosophy of
speculative realism through a fresh reappropriation of the
philosophical tradition and an openness to its outside. The first
published work to explore the new philosophical field of
speculative realism, the second volume of Collapse features a
selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young
philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and
filmmakers, and searching interviews with leading scientists.
Comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from
quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, it
involves them in unforeseen and productive syntheses. Against the
tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume
testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical
philosophical problematics-the status of the scientific object,
metaphysics and its "end," the prospects for a revival of
speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology,
transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the
necessity of contingency-both through a fresh reappropriation of
the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside.
The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by
the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge
between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.
A rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to
science, philosophy, and art, so as to discover an essence of
photography that precedes its historical, technological, and
aesthetic conditions. If philosophy has always understood its
relation to the world according to the model of the instantaneous
flash of a photographic shot, how can there be a "philosophy of
photography" that is not viciously self-reflexive? Challenging the
assumptions made by any theory of photography that leaves its own
"onto-photo-logical" conditions uninterrogated, Laruelle thinks the
photograph non-philosophically, so as to discover an essence of
photography that precedes its historical, technological and
aesthetic conditions. The Concept of Non-Photography develops a
rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science,
philosophy, and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key
concepts of Laruelle's "non-philosophy."
A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented
Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications
for philosophy today. How does the patience and rigour of
philosophical explanation fare when confronted with an
irrepressible desire to commune with the object and to escape the
subjective perplexities of reference, meaning, and sense? Moving
beyond the hype and the inflated claims made for "Object-Oriented"
thought, Peter Wolfendale considers its emergence in the light of
the intertwined legacies of twentieth-century analytic and
Continental traditions. Both a remarkably clear explication of the
tenets of OOP and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications
for philosophy today, Object-Oriented Philosophy is a major
engagement with one of the most prevalent trends in recent
philosophy.
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Speculative Aesthetics (Paperback, 1)
Robin Mackay, James Trafford, Luke Pendrell, Amanda Beech, Benedict Singleton
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R336
R268
Discovery Miles 2 680
Save R68 (20%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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An examination of the new technological mediations between the
human sensorium and the planetary media network and of the
aesthetic as an enabler of new modes of knowledge. This series of
interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for
aesthetics ranges from contemporary art's relation to the
aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design.
From varied perspectives of philosophy, art, and design,
participants examine the new technological mediations between the
human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within
which it now exists and consider how the aesthetic enables new
modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic
formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics
anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer
invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but
acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world
today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling,
formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer
new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured
aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions.
A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern
painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to
challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history,
The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in
which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations
unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new
'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems
pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the
oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount
the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential
forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the
name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual.
A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The
Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and
sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and
draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic
revolution in modern painting.
A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern
painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to
challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history,
The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in
which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations
unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new
'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems
pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the
oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount
the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential
forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the
name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual.
A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The
Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and
sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and
draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic
revolution in modern painting.
An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of
texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in
contemporary philosophy. Accelerationism is the name of a
contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical
political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt,
critique, or detourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its
uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the
impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the
theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU,
across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF
cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in
texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed
by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by
Marx that call attention to his own "Prometheanism," and key works
from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of
new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal
capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At
the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this
disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical
conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and
capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet
urgently galvanized today by the poverty of "reasonable"
contemporary political alternatives.
A philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance,
contingency, and eternity through a concentrated study of
Mallarme's poem "Un Coup de Des." A meticulous literary study, a
detective story a la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an
adventure novel-such is the register in which can be deciphered the
hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author
of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the
concepts of chance, contingency, infinity, and eternity through a
concentrated study of Mallarme's poem "Un Coup de Des," patiently
deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly
simple and lucid insight with regard to Mallarme's "unique Number."
The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux
comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child's
game. The Number that "can be no other" can only be revealed to us
via a secret code, hidden in the "Coup de des" like a key that
finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also
unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash
amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama
that is still unfolding. With this bold new interpretation of
Mallarme's work, Meillassoux offers brilliant insights into
modernity, poetics, secularism, and religion, and opens a new
chapter in his philosophy of radical contingency. The volume
contains the entire text of the "Coup de des" and three other
poems, with new English translations.
A reevaluation of Matisse that reveals the complex function of his
work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from
traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself.
Accused by his contemporaries of both arid overtheorisation and a
hedonistic abandon to the pleasures of color, decried for a
preoccupation with the merely decorative, retrospectively consigned
to a subsidiary role in an official History of Art that sees the
liberation of color from iconic conventions and symbolic
associations as the inevitable precursor to the purified color of
modernist formalis, Matisse, with his untimely singularity, his
break with the History of Art, and the part he played in undoing
the image is ripe for the reevaluation undertaken here with great
panache by Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, who with this volume
restore Matisse to his place within the prehistory of contemporary
art, while continuing to transform our understanding of the latter.
It was Matisse who, with his understanding of the construction of
colours as a means of vital expression, continued to exacerbate the
fauves' decisive break with Form; in doing so, he also opened up
painting to its outside, by cutting out color, and releasing it
onto the walls and into architecture by way of a decorativity
virtually generalized to the whole environment. With a series of
detailed and compelling extended analyses of Matisse's works, we
learn how "Matisse-thought" arrived at the magic formula
expression=construction=decoration. This volume, the second "case
study" in Alliez and Bonne's Undoing the Image, gives us a new
Matisse extracted from cliches and stereotypes both popular and
learned, revealing the complex function of his work and thought in
contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of
art, and even from the art form itself.
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