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Signs and symbols represent abstract ideas and concrete objects,
providingn a sense of number, danger, value, distances in time and
space, and even love. Over time, these marks and gestures have
multiplied into an immernse and complex network of images, pictures
and emblems - pictographs and logographs, maps and charts,
letterforms, colours and patterns. How does a sign represent
something other than itself? How do we come to understand the
maning of a written symbol? What happens when a sign crosses
international borders of language and culture? Can clothes
constitute a sign? Can colours? Can sounds? This work takes the
reader on a journey of discovery through the world of symbols.
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The Story of My Life (Paperback)
Gilberto Pizzamiglio; Giacomo Casanova; Introduction by Gilberto Pizzamiglio; Translated by Sophie Hawkes, Stephen Sartarelli
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Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbucker, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the most notorious lover of the Western world, but a supreme story teller. He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.
A study of the word pair "action and reaction" embracing
philosophy, semantics, literature, and science. What do biologists
mean when they say that to live is to react? Why was the term
abreaction invented and later abandoned by the first generation of
psychoanalysts? What is meant by reactionary politics? These are
but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar
Jean Starobinski answers in his conceptual history of the word
pair, action and reaction. Not simply a history of ideas, Action
and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a
literary history, a history of medicine, and a history of the
biological sciences. By concentrating on the moment when scientific
language and ordinary language diverge, Starobinski uncovers a
genealogy of the human and natural sciences through their usage of
action and reaction as metaphors. Newton's law-to every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction-becomes a point of
departure for an exploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces
left in its wake. Starobinski analyzes the scientific, literary,
and political effects of the use of the terms action and reaction
to describe and explain the material universe, the living body,
historical events, and psychological behavior. In what he calls a
"polyphonic score"-a kind of mosaic-he uses his subject to offer
new insights into the work of philosophers (Aristotle, Leibniz,
Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers), scientists (Newton, Bichat, Bernard,
Bernheim, Freud), and writers (Diderot, Constant, Balzac, Poe,
Valry). Ultimately, the book explores the power and danger of
metaphorical language and questions the convergence and collapse of
scientific and moral explanations of the universe.
The purposeful discontinuities and juxtapositions of Aby Warburg's
iconography and how they can be used to analyze other imagery. Aby
Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the
discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that
bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art
historians of the twentieth century as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind,
and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a
domesticated iconology based on the interpretation of symbolic
material. As Phillippe-Alain Michaud shows in this important book,
Warburg's own project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian
ambitions. Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Burckhardt,
Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the
irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand
teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Vasari, Warburg's
method operated through historical anachronisms and
discontinuities. Using "montage-collision" to create textless
collections of images, he brought together pagan artifacts and
masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, ancient Near East
astrology and the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals and the
sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for
Warburg, the practice of art history was the discovery within the
art work itself of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the
energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Challenging
normative accounts of Western European classicism, Warburg located
the real sources of the Renaissance in the Dionysian spirit, in the
expression of movement and dance, in the experience of trance
personified in the frenzied nymph or ecstatic maenad. Aby Warburg
and the Image in Motion is not only a book about Warburg but a book
written with him; Michaud uses Warburg's intuitions and discoveries
to analyze other categories of imagery, including the
daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early
cinema, and the dances of Loie Fuller. It will be essential reading
for anyone concerned with the origins of modern art history and the
visual culture of modernity.
An exploration of the central role of indirect modes of expression
in ancient China. In what way do we benefit from speaking of things
indirectly? How does such a distancing allow us better to
discover-and describe-people and objects? How does distancing
produce an effect? What can we gain from approaching the world
obliquely? In other words, how does detour grant access? Thus
begins Francois Jullien's investigation into the strategy,
subtlety, and production of meaning in ancient and modern Chinese
aesthetic and political texts and events. Moving between the
rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and China, Jullien does not
attempt a simple comparison of the two civilizations. Instead, he
uses the perspective provided by each to gain access into a culture
considered by many Westerners to be strange-"It's all Chinese to
me"-and whose strangeness has been eclipsed through the assumption
of its familiarity. He also uses the comparison to shed light on
the role of Greek thinking in Western civilization. Jullien rereads
the major texts of Chinese thought-The Book of Songs, Confucius's
Analects, and the work of Mencius and Lao-Tse. He addresses the
question of oblique, indirect, and allusive meaning in order to
explore how the techniques of detour provide access to subtler
meanings than are attainable through direct approaches. Indirect
speech, Jullien concludes, yields a complex mode of indication,
open to multiple perspectives and variations, infinitely adaptable
to particular situations and contexts. Concentrating on that which
is not said, or which is spoken only through other means, Jullien
traces the benefits and costs of this rhetorical strategy in which
absolute truth is absent.
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