Browse

Blanchot’s writings are distinctive for the ways that negativity takes place in them in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, and the nature of its language. However, this role in his thinking is unique and is not to be subsumed to the negativity found in the thought of Hegel or Heidegger, although it partakes of aspects of both. Instead, negativity for Blanchot operates at the level of the ontological status of language, which oscillates undecidably between the assertion and negation of meaning and thereby affects the experience of literature and the possibility of the work with an irreducible ambiguity. To explicate the significance of this negativity it is necessary to turn to another figure for whom it has become as central, Adorno, whose Hegelian background is much stronger, but who also works against this tradition to form his own negative understanding of dialectics that is crucially exemplified in the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art exists as a particular model of its historical and material context, one that both demonstrates its contradictions and also indicates what has been obscured by them. The negativity of the work is thus both that of the critique that it levels against this context and of the possibilities that it negatively raises in its place. To study the two writers together it is necessary to find the place where their thinking converges, which occurs most critically in the area of post-Kantian aesthetics and the question of autonomy.

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the “News of the World” scandal are just the most sensational examples of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this unceasing battle of different forms of listening? Whence this generalized principle of eavesdropping? Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage answers these questions by tracing the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelligence gathering network called “Echelon.” This archeology of auditory surveillance runs parallel with the analysis of its representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing” that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. Relying on the works of Freud, Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, and Derrida, Szendy’s work attempts to locate at the heart of listening the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing” that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides in 406 BCE, Greek singers, poets, and theorists delved deep into auditory experience. They charted its capacity to develop topologies distinct from those of the other senses; contemplated its use as a communicator of information; calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion. They made sound too, artfully and self-consciously creating songs and poems that revelled in sonorousness. Dissonance is about these extraordinary experiments in auditory experience. In three chapters—on auditory figures, affect, and melody respectively—the book aims to show the many points of commonality between ancient Greek auditory art and the concerns of contemporary sound studies, avant-garde music, and aesthetics, making the argument that “classical” Greek song and drama was, in fact, an early European avant-garde, a proto-exploration of the aesthetics of noise. The book thus develops an alternative to that romantic ideal which sees antiquity as a frozen world, a world we can contemplate as though we were the enchanted speaker in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for whom the silent stillness of an ancient vase symbolizes the survival of truths more lasting than the generations of humankind.

In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a “ferociously religious” sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred. Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe (“formless”), the book demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice—an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. Bataille enacts a “monstrous” mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists—a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. This book examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's “sacrificial” interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with “hyperchristianity”; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's “religious sensibility”.

This book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment. Force demonstrates that aesthetics, and hence modern philosophy, began twice. On the one hand, Baumgarten's Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the “subject”: as a totality of faculties; an agent defined by capabilities; one who is able. Yet an aesthetics in the Baumgartian manner, as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force. The latter conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised like a faculty, does not recognize or represent anything because it is obscure and unconscious: the force of what in humanity is distinct from the subject. The aesthetics of force is thus a thinking of the nature of man: of aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture acquired by practice. It founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, human and subject.

Objects are all around us—and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not only an object of value but also a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. This book argues that our relation to things is what makes us human. It shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making an ethical life available to those who live among them. Humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. The alienation commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, this book offers a rethinking of the power of images. Through images, we already live another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.

It is a commonplace in the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality: their intrinsic directedness toward some object. Nevertheless, medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections in mirrors or sounds in the air, as exhibiting intentionality, while they described what modern philosophers would take to be typically mental phenomena, such as sensation and imagination, as ordinary physical processes. Still, medieval philosophers would regard all acts of cognition as characterized by intentionality, on account of which all these acts are some sort of representations of their intended objects. The essays in this volume explore the intricacies and varieties of the conceptual relationships among intentionality, cognition, and mental representation as conceived by some of the greatest medieval philosophers, including Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan, as well as some of their lesser-known but still influential contemporaries. The clarification of these conceptual connections sheds new light not only on the intriguing historical relationships between medieval and modern thought on these issues, but also on some fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind as it is conceived today.

This reflective journey ventures an open exploration of ecstatically experienced embodiment. It seeks to rediscover the fullness of life in the world by relocating us in a more complete activation of the body’s potentials. Wilshire builds on William James’s concept of the much-at-once to name the superabundance of the world that surrounds, nourishes, holds, stimulates, and feeds us from all directions through the medium of our experiencing bodies. Extensive reflections on music serve to exemplify this. The author employs the dynamism and multiplicity of the fugue as a metaphor for how we weave together otherwise cacophonous strains and strands of our experience to form the texture of our world and ourselves. He argues that our deepest need is to feel ecstatically real, as vital and expressive organs in an organic whole. When we drop out of contact with the much-at-once, we lose touch with the stimuli and pulses of life—“the sting of the real,” in James’s phrase—and as a consequence moods like boredom and hopelessness leave us empty of possibility and full of dread. Sacred energies emanating from the much-at-once bind us ecstatically into the vast world in which we are engulfed, infusing us with its regenerative powers, forming our very core, eliciting our interest and commanding our devotion. Appealing to the body’s powers of hearing and feeling over the limiting and distancing aspects of sight and vision, the book engages a rich array of composers, writers, and thinkers ranging from Beethoven and Mahler to Emerson and James.

Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This book addresses an aspect of meaning that has not yet received its due: the relation of meaning in this broad humanistic sense to the shaping of fundamental values. The book examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by both individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what to value and how to value it. With a combination of cultural criticism and close readings of musical works, the chapters demonstrate repeatedly that to make music is also to make value, in every sense. They give particular attention to values that have historically enabled music to assume a formative role in human societies: to foster practices of contemplation, fantasy, and irony; to explore sexuality, subjectivity, and the uncanny; and to articulate longings for unity with nature and for moral certainty. Each chapter shows, in its own way, how music may provoke transformative reflection in its listeners and thus help guide humanity to its own essential embodiment in the world.

This book rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime feeling, the book shows how, from the mid-18th century onward, sublime feeling is, instead, constantly rearticulated in a complex interaction with musicality. It takes as the point of departure Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-François Lyotard's aesthetic writings of the 1980s and 1990s. Kant framed the sublime narratively as an epic of self-transcendence. By contrast, Lyotard sought to substitute open immanence for Kantian transcendence, yet he failed to deconstruct the Kantian epic. The book performs this deconstruction by juxtaposing 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of the infinite, Sehnsucht, the divided self, and unconscious drives with contemporary readings of instrumental music. Critically assessing Edmund Burke, James Usher, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this book re-presents the sublime as a feeling that defers resolution and hangs suspended between pain and pleasure. It rewrites the mathematical sublime as différence, while it redresses the dynamical sublime as trauma: unending, undetermined, unresolved. Whereas most musicological studies in this area have focused on traces of the Kantian sublime in Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, this book calls on the 19th-century theorist Arthur Seidl to analyze the sublime of, rather than in, music. It does so by invoking Seidl's concept of formwidrigkeit (“form-contrariness”) in juxtaposition with Romantic piano music, and (post)modernist musical minimalisms.

Music invents, constructs, and makes bodies. These are not only technical bodies—those prostheses and artefacts that instruments of music are—but also bodies living a strange life, bodies as strange as a hand with more than five fingers, feet that breathe like lungs, or long-distance touching without contact. In this book, organology, that self-respecting discipline that inventories sound-producing bodies, is questioned for its anthropocentric presuppositions. Beyond the rational descriptions where it inscribes instrumentalists, it is a matter of thinking the forms of hybridation and organ transplants for which the general rhetoric of musical bodies makes space. The central concept of this rhetoric is that of effiction: this is the name for the invention of unprecedented bodies, whether they be as singular as Thelonious Monk’s hand or as collective as the ones that arise from an equipment of long distance innervations. Along the path of this general and deconstructed organology, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Benjamin serve as guides, as do Bill Evans, Chopin, and Sergei Eisenstein.

Originally written for an exhibition curated by Jean-Luc Nancy at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form—of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions. Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic, filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses. If drawing is not reducible to any form of closure, it never resolves a tension specific to itself. Rather, drawing allows the pleasure in and of drawing, the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge, to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Sigmund Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation, form as a formative force. Between the sections of the text, Nancy has placed a series of “sketchbooks” on drawing, composed of a broad range of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.

This book examines the practice of portraits as a way in to grasping the paradoxes of subjectivity. This book is written from the perspective that the portrait is suspended between likeness and strangeness, identity and distance, representation and presentation, exactitude and forcefulness. It can identify an individual, but it can also express the dynamics by means of which its subject advances and withdraws. The book consists of two extended essays written a decade apart but in close conversation, in which the author considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Heavily illustrated, it includes a newly written preface bringing the two essays together and a substantial Introduction, which places the author's work within the range of thinking of aesthetics and the subject, from religion, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Though undergirded by a powerful grasp of the philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that has rendered our sense of the subject so problematic, this book is at heart an unpretentious reading of three dozen portraits, from ancient drinking mugs to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which the artistic representation of a sitter is made from their blood, germ cultures, or DNA. The contemporary world of ubiquitous photos, the book argues, in no way makes the portrait a thing of the past. On the contrary, the forms of appearing that mark the portrait continue to challenge how we see the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders call on us to face up to, then reflect upon the phenomena of loss, displacement, violence, witnessing, mortality, and responsibility. The way these saturated, overwhelming phenomena come to us requires close and patient focus if we are to adequately receive them in their particularity and depth. Thus, the goal is not to posit or attempt to prove a thesis regarding the literature, architecture, or film, but to convey and clarify the intense force of each art work in a way that does not reduce what they compellingly bring forth into our world—but that instead enables us to more fully absorb the dense, dark, and troubling subject matter. The primary tactic is to explicate the works by deploying the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion to reflect on what is laid before us. This first level of opening up possible meanings, in turn, calls all of us who read the novel, move through the museum, or see the film to respond. Finally the task of interpretation falls upon each of us; it is ours alone and unavoidable—how could it be otherwise?

The title of this book translates one of the many ways in which Lucretius names the basic matter from which the world is made in De rerum natura. For Lucretius, and in the strain of thought following his study, matter is always in motion, always differing from itself and yet always also made of the same stuff. From the pious Lucy Hutchinson's all but complete translation of the Roman epic poem to Margaret Cavendish's repudiation of atomism (but not of its fundamental problematic of sameness and difference), a central concern of this book is how a thoroughgoing materialism can be read alongside other strains in the thought of the early modern period, particularly Christianity. The chapters move from Milton's monism to his angels and their insistent corporeality. Milton's angels have sex, and, throughout, this study emphasizes the consequences for thinking about sexuality offered by Lucretian materialism. Sameness of matter is not simply a question of same-sex copulation, and the relations of atoms in Cavendish and Hutchinson are replicated in the terms in which they imagine marriages of partners who are also their doubles. Likewise, Spenser's knights in the 1590 Faerie Queene pursue the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity in quests that take the reader on a path of “askesis” of the kind that Lucretius recommends and that Foucault studied in the final volumes of his history of sexuality. Although English literature is the book's main concern, it first contemplates relations between Lucretian matter and Pauline flesh by way of Tintoretto's painting, The Conversion of St. Paul. Theoretical issues took place in the work of Agamben and Badiou, among others, leading to a chapter that takes up the role that Lucretius has played in theory, from Bergson and Marx to Foucault and Deleuze.

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, or smell the world around us. But sensibility is not just a faculty: We are sensible objects both to ourselves and to others, and our life is through and through a sensible life. This book, now translated into five languages, rehabilitates sensible existence from its marginalization at the hands of modern philosophy, theology, and politics. The author begins by defining the ontological status of images. Not just an internal modification of our consciousness, an image has an intermediate ontological status that differs from that of objects or subjects. The book's second part explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion, and biological facts like growth and generation. Our life, the book argues, is the life of images.

In this book, John Kaag explores the following questions: What is the imagination? And where does the imagination come from? In order to answer these questions, Kaag explains the way that the concept of the imagination has been articulated in the history of Western philosophy, concentrating on its development in 18th century German idealism (primarily in the writings of Kant and Schiller) and in 19th century American pragmatism (embodied in the writings of C.S. Peirce). Kaag's historical approach to the imagination reveals important affinities between German idealism and the philosophy of C.S. Peirce. The primary goal of this intellectual history, however, is to reveal crucial point concerning the definition and the origins of the imagination and human creativity. The imagination should not be regarded as a narrow aesthetic faculty, but rather as a process that plays a vital role in human cognition and meaning-making. The imagination has long been regarded as belonging to artists and poets, but what Kaag's account suggests is that this artistic process emerges from natural processes, making sense of Kant's very bold claim that human genius is a “gift of nature.” Kant, Schiller and Peirce—with increasing specificity—argue that the dynamics of nature are in some way continuous with the creativity of human thinking and doing. This position regarding the “nature of the imagination” encourages Kaag to reconsider the unique form of idealism that emerges in post-Kantian thought (an idealism like Peirce's that takes seriously the findings of the empirical sciences). In the final sections of the book, Kaag turns to contemporary cognitive neuroscience to see if this emerging discipline can help chart the way of the imagination.

Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of universality, freedom and humanity, and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy. It challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies and the lack of attention to aesthetics in critical race theory. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful racial regime of representation whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is an activity that articulates the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: the racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. In its five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the sterotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura, and representation.