Eroticizing Aesthetics

Eroticizing Aesthetics PDF Author: Tim Themi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538147831
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Bataille’s view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacan’s of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Bataille’s many interventions into the history of aesthetics — from his confrontations with Breton’s surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux — radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the “jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression” in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.

Eroticizing Aesthetics

Eroticizing Aesthetics PDF Author: Tim Themi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538147831
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Bataille’s view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacan’s of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Bataille’s many interventions into the history of aesthetics — from his confrontations with Breton’s surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux — radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the “jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression” in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.

Aesthetic Sexuality

Aesthetic Sexuality PDF Author: Romana Byrne
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441183582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
To understand why the concept of aesthetic sexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality. Arguing against Foucault's assertions that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture while ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, Byrne suggests that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what she calls aesthetic sexuality'. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, sexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic sexuality, value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality's raison d'être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication.

Ars Erotica

Ars Erotica PDF Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
Drawing on theories of lovemaking from ancient Asian and Western cultures, this book provides a new aesthetics of erotic love.

Political Jouissance

Political Jouissance PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350352772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
When we oppose or disagree with something important, do we ever really do it dispassionately? Isn't setting the world to rights or condemning a political opponent always done with a hint of relish, or at least enthusiasm? This book's challenging essays explore the modes in which that transgressive pleasure of political 'jouissance' operates. Rather than delegitimizing or depoliticising, the tacit enjoyment of outrage can in fact facilitate different forms of engagement. The tendency for groups to be bonded by a common enemy, for example, brings with it a protection from censure or persecution, and a way of alleviating guilt. In this collection, the authors seek out jouissance in the battle against patriarchy, in social revolts, in the age of mechanical surveillance, in the necrosociety of neoliberalism, or the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Drawing on Lacan's insistence that jouissance is intrinsically political by its nature, we can understand how readily psychoanalytic ideas can be put to use across the geopolitical spectrum.

Ecstasy Unlimited

Ecstasy Unlimited PDF Author: Laura Kipnis
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452901541
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In "Ecstasy Unlimited", Laura Kipnis provides a collection of essays on popular culture, politics, aesthetics, feminism, and postmodernism, along with complete scripts from three of her videotapes. These essays, written from her perspective as a practising artist, in tandem with her videoscripts, are singular in bringing a wide range of theoretical sophistication to film and video studies. Kipnis challenges political and aesthetic orthodoxies. Her interpretations take risks at a number of levels, and do not easily fit into established disciplines and categories. Extensively illustrated with stills from her videotapes, "Ecstasy Unlimited" examines everyday life and popular culture produced by consumer capitalism in ironic - and, at times, very funny - ways. Laura Kipnis is a video artist and theorist whose work has been shown widely in the United States and Europe. Her latest video production is "Marx: the Video". She has written extensively on the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, feminism, and popular culture. This book is intended for students and academics of media studies, cultural politics.

Baumgarten's Aesthetics

Baumgarten's Aesthetics PDF Author: J. Colin McQuillan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538146266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced “aesthetics” as a new science in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) and developed this new part of philosophy in a series of later works, culminating in his unfinished Aesthetics (1750/1758). This volume is the first collection of essays in the English language devoted to Baumgarten’s aesthetics. The essays highlight the distinguishing features of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, situate it in its historical context, document its reception, and examine its contributions to contemporary philosophy.

Speaking the Unspeakable

Speaking the Unspeakable PDF Author: Peter Michelson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791412244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, “Reage,” Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene —in the sense of speaking the unspeakable— is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.

Posing Sex

Posing Sex PDF Author: Alan Singer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501339192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the “sex image,” the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful métier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical tradition-from the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agency-to show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based artworks-literary, painterly, and cinematic-Singer illustrates the proposition that “posing sex” broadens the scope of our knowledge about how feeling reciprocates with reason-giving.

What Art Does

What Art Does PDF Author: Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538167336
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The question of what and how artworks mean things is conventionally satisfied by appealing to literature from either philosophy of art or philosophy of language. This book offers an alternative by positioning art as a type of meaning-making tool whose function can only be understood through the application of the philosophy of technology.

Art as Capital

Art as Capital PDF Author: Polona Tratnik
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538154234
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In global terms, creative industries are on the rise, as are new media investigations in art and initiatives that encourage innovation in the arts, for end-use in the economy. However, there is a significant lack of critical reflection on this form of creative production. This important book points out the dangers and downfalls that accompany such a boom of the creative industries and the subordination of art to the economy and politics. Specifically, it shows that art, as a mode of social and aesthetic practice, is losing the very thing which it has striven for so desperately in the course of modernity: its independence from other spheres of human activity.