Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes PDF Author: Pierre Klossowski
Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Together, these two novels comprise one of the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary fiction. Both feature Octave, an elderly cleric, his striking, austere, yet sensual young wife, Roberte and their nephew, Antoine. In Roberte Ce Soir, the heroine engages in a ritual of hospitality, designed by Octave, whereby she offers herself to any guest who shows desire for her. This device becomes a circular game of realizing one's own identity through the reaction to a third person since, Klossowski asserts, the body is the envelope of the soul and its every expression is a permissible condition of spiritual progress. In The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the scholastic aspect of Roberte Ce Soir gives way to a more complex story composed of situations that throw a strange light on human behaviour. Roberte is now a socially and politically well-situated member of the official council for censorship. Dissatisfied by marital legitimacy, she discovers the world of sexual perversion and imposes on herself the duty of exploring it — the ultimate goal of her scandalous yet farcical task is the achievement of complete freedom.

The Cinema of Raœl Ruiz

The Cinema of Raœl Ruiz PDF Author: Michael Goddard
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023116730X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Raúl Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work in English. This volume sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget 'European' costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work – with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources – as a type of 'impossible' cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.

The Delirium of Praise

The Delirium of Praise PDF Author: Eleanor Kaufman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801876273
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being—including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work—and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing. The Delirium of Praise examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals—Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski—and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-René des Forêts; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" (désoeuvrement) and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality. Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history.

Melancholy, Love, and Time

Melancholy, Love, and Time PDF Author: Peter G. Toohey
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025597
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Ancient literature features many powerful narratives of madness, depression, melancholy, lovesickness, simple boredom, and the effects of such psychological states upon individual sufferers. Peter Toohey turns his attention to representations of these emotional states in the Classical, Hellenistic, and especially the Roman imperial periods in a study that illuminates the cultural and aesthetic significance of this emotionally charged literature. His probing analysis shows that a shifting representation of these afflicted states, and the concomitant sense of isolation from one's social affinities and surroundings, manifests a developing sense of the self and self-consciousness in the ancient world. This book makes important contributions to a variety of disciplines including classical studies, comparative literature, literary and art history, history of medicine, history of emotions, psychiatry, and psychology. Peter Toohey is Professor and Department Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Figures of Possibility

Figures of Possibility PDF Author: Niklaus Largier
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631052
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries, generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception, emotions, and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities, and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and most recently in forms of "new materialism." Read as a history of the senses and emotions, the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration, it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities, and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artifacts.

Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings

Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings PDF Author: Barry Stocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000100979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth-century, Jacques Derrida’s ideas on deconstruction have had a lasting impact on philosophy, literature and cultural studies. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings is the first anthology to present his most important philosophical writings and is an indispensable resource for all students and readers of his work. Barry Stocker’s clear and helpful introductions set each reading in context, making the volume an ideal companion for those coming to Derrida’s writings for the first time. The selections themselves range from his most infamous works including Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference to lesser known discussion on aesthetics, ethics and politics.

Apparitions, Daemons, and Emanations

Apparitions, Daemons, and Emanations PDF Author: Charles Freeland
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438496664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
The book presents a new study of the visual arts and poetry in the work of three well-known French writers and artists from the mid-twentieth century—Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Henri Michaux. Each was fiercely independent, belonging to no school, academy, or political persuasion. What do they have in common? While the book's three central essays do not initially set out to establish comparisons between these writers, common ground emerges: a shared combat against culture, a shared non-representational artistic practice. Their writing, poetry, and painting offer not a portrayal of things or ideas but rather an emanation or apparition of the unknown and the infinite, one charged with deepening art's relation to life.

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud PDF Author: Edward Scheer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136480595
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This resource collects for the first time some of the best criticism on Artaud's life and work from writers such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Herbert Blau, Leo Bersani and Susan Sontag. Antonin Artaud was one of the most brilliant artists of the twentieth century. His writing influenced entire generations, from the French post-structuralists to the American beatniks. He was a key figure in the European cinema of the 1920s and '30s, and his drawings and sketches have been displayed in some of the major art galleries of the Western world. Possibly best known for his concept of a 'theatre of cruelty', his legacy has been to re-define the possibilities of live performance. Containing some of the most intellectually adventurous and emotionally passionate writings on Artaud, this book is essential reading for Artaud scholars working in arts disciplines including theatre, film, philosophy, literature and fine art.

Deleuze, The Dark Precursor

Deleuze, The Dark Precursor PDF Author: Eleanor Kaufman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421406489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A thoughtful and original analysis of the writings of influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on apparently negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

Foucault and Religion

Foucault and Religion PDF Author: Jeremy Carrette
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134632274
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Foucault and Religion is the first major study of Michel Foucault in relation and response to Religion. Jeremy Carrette offers us a challenging new look at Foucault's work and addresses a religious dimension that has previously been neglected. We see that prior to Foucault's infamous unpublished volume in the 'History of Sexuality', on the theme of Christianity, there is a complex religious sub-text which anticipates this final unseen work. Jeremy Carrette argues that Foucault offers a twofold critique of Christianity by bringing the body and sexuality into religious practice and exploring a political spirituality of the self. He shows us that Foucault's creation of a body theology through the death of God, reveals how religious beliefs reflect the sexual body, questions the notion of a mystical archaeology and exposes the political technology of confession. Anyone interested in understanding Foucault's thought in a new light will find this book a truly fascinating read.