The aesthetic exception

The aesthetic exception PDF Author: Tony Fisher
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526170159
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art’s politics is limited to a recondite space of ‘autonomous resistance’. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art’s exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to ‘effect’ to offer a nuanced account of art’s political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the ‘new’ through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.

The aesthetic exception

The aesthetic exception PDF Author: Tony Fisher
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526170159
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art’s politics is limited to a recondite space of ‘autonomous resistance’. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art’s exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to ‘effect’ to offer a nuanced account of art’s political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the ‘new’ through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.

States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel

States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel PDF Author: Arne De Boever
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441181733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the political situation in both the United States and abroad has often been described as a "state of exception": an emergency situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended. In such a situation, the need for good decisions is felt ever more strongly. This book investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of various decisions represented in novels published around 9/11: Martel's Life of Pi, Eugenides' Middlesex, Coetzee's Disgrace, and Sebald's Austerlitz. De Boever's readings of the novels revolve around what he calls the 'aesthetic decision.' Which aesthetics do the characters and narrators in the novels adopt in a situation of crisis? How do these aesthetic decisions relate to the ethical and political decisions represented in the novels? What can they reveal about real-life ethical and political decisions? This book uncovers the politics of allegory, autobiography, focalization, and montage in today's planetary state of exception.

The Culture of Exception

The Culture of Exception PDF Author: Bulent Diken
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134266464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
We live in an ever-fragmenting society, in which distinctions between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, mobility and immobility, reality and representation, seem to be disappearing. This book demonstrates the hidden logic beneath this process, which is also the logic of 'the camp'. Social theory has traditionally interpreted the camp as an anomaly, as an exceptional site situated on the margins of society, aiming to neutralize its 'failed citizens' and 'enemies'. However, in contemporary society, 'the camp' has now become the rule and consequently a new interrogation of its logic is necessary. In this exceptional volume, the authors explore the paradox of the camp, as representing both an old fear of enclosure and a new dream of belonging. They illustrate their arguments by drawing on contemporary sites of exemption - such as refugee camps, rape camps and favelas - as well as sites of self-exemption including gated communities, party tourism and celebrity cultures.

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism PDF Author: Arne De Boever
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962200
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Reconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics Here, Arne De Boever proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to describe the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism challenges that belief by focusing on the sovereign artist as genius, as well as the original artwork as the foundation of the art market. Engaging with sculpture, conceptual artwork, and painting by emerging and established artists, De Boever proposes a worldly, democratic notion of unexceptional art as an antidote to the problems of aesthetic exceptionalism. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Reading Ranciere

Reading Ranciere PDF Author: Paul Bowman
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441132139
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Over the past 40 years, Jacques Rancière's work has defined itself through a remarkable set of philosophical differences in relation to other key figures working in the fields of politics, philosophy and aesthetics. There have been significant philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic disagreements with influential figures in contemporary thought, including Althusser, Bourdieu, Derrida, Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Habermas and Badiou. Through these differences Rancière has emerged as one of the world's leading contemporary theorists. Whilst Rancière has long been a well-known force in francophone contexts, the translation of his works into English has generated a lot of excitement and catapulted him to the forefront of attention in several putatively distinct but interconnected fields: philosophy, politics, critical theory, aesthetics and film. Reading Rancière intervenes in this ongoing discourse by assembling an eminent collection of critical assessments of the significance of Rancière's diverse impact and growing influence. This book offers a sustained, critically balanced response to the work of this major contemporary theorist, as well as a new interview and a key text published here for the first time.

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures PDF Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy

The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy PDF Author: Alison Ross
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804754880
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Ross argues that the thinking of Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy must be understood as ways of addressing the problem of presentation as framed by and inherited from Kant's Critique of Judgment.

State of Exception

State of Exception PDF Author: Elena Bellina
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807478
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
In a globalized world exposed to ever more dramatic dangers, the established legal order enters into crisis and the rhetoric of fear is deployed in order to legitimate states of exception. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has widely elaborated on the historical effects of the juridical concept of the state of exception, recalling the definition formulated by German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. The state of exception presents itself as an inherently elusive phenomenon, a juridical no-man's land where the law is suspended in order to be preserved. The juridical tensions inherent in the state of exception necessitate a constant interplay of anomie and nomos, an ongoing interaction between order and the suspension of order used to justify every conceivable abuse of power. Such interplay, epitomized by the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA, has become central to today’s geopolitical scenario. This book examines the implications of the “state of exception” on both a macro and micropolitical level strongly informed by Italy's long history of exceptional uses of power. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores philosophical issues related to the history of the state of exception within the frame of juridical, political, and economical principles. The second part focuses on Italian cultural and literary production during times of socio-political crisis, devoting special attention to the ways in which history may interact with its fictional representations. The third section is devoted to the literary and cinematic representations of the biopolitical effects of the state of exception on Italian urban areas and the spectacularization of terrorism in Italian cinema.

The Art of Freedom

The Art of Freedom PDF Author: Juliane Rebentisch
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745693148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The concept of democratic freedom refers to more than the kind of freedom embodied by political institutions and procedures. Democratic freedom can only be properly understood if it is grasped as the expression of a culture of freedom that encompasses an entire form of life. Juliane Rebentisch’s systematic and historical approach demonstrates that we can learn a great deal about the democratic culture of freedom from its philosophical critics. From Plato to Carl Schmitt, the critique of democratic culture has always been articulated as a critique of its ãaestheticization“. Rebentisch defends various phenomena of aestheticization Ð from the irony typical of democratic citizens to the theatricality of the political Ð as constitutive elements of democratic culture and the notion of freedom at the heart of its ethical and political self-conception. This work will be of particular interest to students of Political Theory, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

The Neither/nor of the Second Sex

The Neither/nor of the Second Sex PDF Author: Céline León
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780881461039
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Although Kierkegaad provided many a puzzle for his biographers, one would be wrong to assume Kierkegaard invariably lied when he claimed to be telling the truth. Tying Kierkegaard's baffling misogyny, and ultimately his misogamy, to the existence of an inner mysterium, The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex navigates between the Charybdis of an allegedly insurmountable gulf between works and biography and the Scylla of the biographical fallacy, a peril whose threat raised greater alarms in Kierkegaard. Celine Leon draws her conclusions by paying close attention to the texts and by carefully distinguishing between author and pseudonyms. She only brings works and life together when Kierkegaard ambivalently plays with the former in order to impart something of the secret lying at the core of his being, to reverse Sartre's famous formulation, to communicate at the heart of hiddenness. Leon shows how Kierkegaard-a writer whose views on other subjects she holds in high regard-projected his lack onto a particular woman, Regina Olsen, his one time fiancee and lifelong obsession, then onto all women, and ultimately, regarding his own exceptional status as normative, elected to ban the heterosexual relation altogether. This is not, however, the same as saying that-notwithstanding the religious development and the enormous production whose twin onset he ascribed to the rupture with Regina-Kierkegaard did not do so at an egregious personal cost. Book jacket.