Arts Of Impoverishment

Download or read book Arts of Impoverishment written by Leo Bersani and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority.

Download or read book Untimely Beggar written by Patrick Greaney and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor? Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin’s final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature’s relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor. This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarm, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity’s intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty. Patrick Greaney is assistant professor of German studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Download or read book World Spectators written by Kaja Silverman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself. In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.

Download or read book Conversation Pieces written by Grant H. Kester and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grant Kester discusses the disparate network of artists & collectives united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, & culture.

Download or read book The Philosophical Baroque written by Erik S. Roraback and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will be of value to all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies

Download or read book Why are Artists Poor? written by Hans Abbing and published by Peterson's. This book was released on 2002 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unconventional socio-economic analysis of the economic position of the arts and artists

Download or read book Thoughts and Things written by Leo Bersani and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Bersani s career spans more than 50 years, and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsfrom French studies, modernism, realist fiction, and psychoanalytic criticism, to film theory and queer theory (a field Bersani could be said to have invented). In Thoughts and Things Bersani emerges as a thinker of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, i.e., he emerges as a philosopher of the first order. In this elegant series of essays, he posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). His exemplary texts range from Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) to Claire Denis (the French filmmaker whose masterpiece is Beau Travail). But he then asks whether a fissure of being between the subject and the world might simply be masking a more fundamental oneness, arguably a oneness intrinsic to our being in and with the world. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources from Dsecartes to cosmology, Sufi mysticism, and neo-Platonism. Cosmos and individual, past and present merge in the idea that our bodies contain atoms from stars that exploded millions of years ago: res cogitans and res extensa, for Bersani, are united in the oneness of cosmic being. This little book, in its sensitive treatment of films and literary texts, succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. It is a new departure for Bersani, and will be devoured by his growing body of devoted readers."