Felicity Colman (ed.): Film, Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema, philosophy, theory
Thoroughly intertwined, film and philosophy have a complex relationship between thought and perception, time and memory, as well as social, political, and aesthetic experiences. Philosophy has underpinned the creation of cinema while cinema, in turn, has redefined philosophical categories, rethought sex, gender, time and space, and created new concepts that illuminate phenomenology, metaphysics, and epistemology.
An ideal introduction for students, Film, Theory and Philosophy brings together leading scholars to provide a clear, detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. From continental philosophers to analytical philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, the essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But most importantly, the essays explore how cinema has shaped contemporary philosophy and how philosophy has led to a reappraisal of film. This collection will prove an invaluable reference and guide to readers interested in a deeper understanding of the issues and insights presented by the philosophy of film.
Publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009
ISBN 0773537007, 9780773537002
Length 404 pages
Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, critical theory, cultural production, deterritorialization, marxism, modernism, philosophy, postmodern, postmodernism, theory
Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.
Publisher Verso, 1998
ISBN 1859841821, 9781859841822
Length 206 pages
Joscelyn Godwin: Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750-1950 (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, esotericism, france, history of music, music, occultism, philosophy, philosophy of music
This book is an adventure into the unexplored territory of French esoteric philosophies and their relation to music. Occultism and esotericism flourished in nineteenth-century France as they did nowhere else. Many philosophers sought the key to the universe, some claimed to have found it, and, in the unitive vision that resulted, music invariably played an important part. These modern Pythagoreans all believed in the Harmony of the Spheres and in the powerful effects of music on the human soul and body. Faced with the challenge of the rationalist Enlightenment, then with that of modern scientism, they adapted their occultism to the prevailing style. A widely published musicologist and authority on esotericism, Godwin is able to give a clear and concise context for these philosophers’ often surprising beliefs, and he demonstrates how this “speculative music” influenced composers such as Satie and Debussy, who were familiar with occultism. His long study of music and the Western esoteric tradition makes him uniquely qualified to unravel the strange story of these forgotten sages.
Publisher University of Rochester Press, 1995
Volume 3 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1878822535, 9781878822536
Length 261 pages
Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · communism, critique, deconstruction, hauntology, history, labor, marxism, philosophy, philosophy of history, politics, revolution
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values.
In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, ‘Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, ‘Specters of Marx’, delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
Translated from French by Peggy Kamuf
With an introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg
Publisher Routledge, 1994
Routledge classics
ISBN 0415389577, 9780415389570
198 pages
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Steven Shaviro: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales (2010)
Filed under paper | Tags: · affect, capitalism, cinema, critique, emotion, film, labor, music, music video, neoliberalism, philosophy, post-cinema
Steven Shaviro: “The new issue (14.1) of the open-access journal Film-Philosophy is now online.
Featured in this issue as an ‘extended article’ (it comes out to 100 pages!) is my latest: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.
The article is freely available for download; it comprises about two thirds of my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Affect, appearing sometime later this year from Zero Books. (The book version will include two additional chapters: one on Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer, and a general conclusion).” (from author’s blog)
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View / Download other articles in Film Philosophy journal, issue 14.1
Verena Andermatt Conley (ed.): Rethinking Technologies (1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, autopoiesis, cyberspace, cyborgs, philosophy, philosophy of technology, postmodern, science, technology, virtual reality
Grounded on the assumption that the relationship between the arts and the sciences is dictated by technology, the essays in Rethinking Technologies explore trends in contemporary thought that have been changing our awareness of science, technology, and the arts.
Contributors: Teresa Brennan, Patrick Clancy, Verena Andermatt Conley, Scott Durham, Thierry de Duve, Françoise Gaillard, Félix Guattari, N. Katherine Hayles, Alberto Moreiras, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell, Ingrid Scheibler, Paul Virilio.
Edited by Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective (Oxford, Ohio)
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1993
ISBN 0816622159, 9780816622153
248 pages
Jacques Barzun: Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, 2nd ed (1941/1981)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, culture, darwinism, evolution, history, marxism, music, philosophy, politics, revolution, science
The nomination of Wagner rather than Freud in the trinity of emblematic modern minds is a sign of Barzun’s profound interest in music and the arts. He argued that these men achieved their reputations by catching the spirit of the age, like surfers on a wave, backed by the formidable public relations exercises mounted by their followers . This earned them the status of intellectual icons despite their lack of originality and the significant flaws in their systems. He described in some detail how all the leading ideas of evolutionary theory, socialism and the leading role of the artist were commonplace for decades before the big three started work.
Barzun was especially critical of the way that their adherents promoted determinism and scientism, with truly disastrous political consequences in the twentieth century. In addition to the shortcomings of their systems, two of the three titans were monstrously egocentric and unprincipled exploiters of their friends and denigrators of their enemies. These personal characteristics became prominent in the modus operandi of their followers, setting the tone for bad manners in transactions between intellectuals that have persisted to the present time.
Second Edition with a new Preface
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
ISBN 0-226-03859-9
373 pages
André Nusselder: Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, cyborgs, fantasy, philosophy, philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis, screen, technology
Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual.
Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.
Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Short Circuits series
ISBN 0262513005, 9780262513005
Length 176 pages
Graham MacPhee: The Architecture of the Visible. Technology and Urban Visual Culture (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · phenomenology, philosophy, postmodernism, technology, urbanism, visual culture
Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual–now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy–have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals–from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida–have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire’s flaneur to Benjamin’s arcades.The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York–two key world cities for over two centuries–Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
Technologies : studies in culture & theory
Volume 3 of Technologies (London, England)
ISBN 0826459269, 9780826459268
Length 234 pages
Steve Goodman: Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · afrofuturism, anarchitecture, electronic music, philosophy, sound
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza strip, and high frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.
Most theoretical discussions of sound and music cultures in relationship to power, Goodman argues, have a missing dimension: the politics of frequency. Goodman supplies this by drawing a speculative diagram of sonic forces, investigating the deployment of sound systems in the modulation of affect. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.
Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262013479, 9780262013475
Length 240 pages
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Slavoj Zizek: Mluvil tu nekdo o totalitarismu? (2007) [Czech]
Filed under book | Tags: · ideology, philosophy, political theory, politics, totalitarianism
Kniha si neklade za cíl podat další systematický výklad dějin pojmu totalitarismus, spíše se pokouší filosoficky sledovat pohyb jeho významu. V několika oddílech autor zkoumá mýtus a jeho proměny, moc bezmocných, melancholii a čin….Slavoj Žižek je slovinský filosof, sociolog a kulturní teoretik levicového zaměření navazující na dílo francouzského psychoanalytika Jacquese Lacana. Působí na lublaňské univerzitě a na dalších akademických pracovištích.
Translated by Martin Ritter from “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?”
Publisher: tranzit.cz, 2007
ISBN: 80-903452-8-X, EAN: 9788090345287
272 pages
Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · literature, mass media, media studies, philosophy, photography, recording, sociology, technology, teletechnologies, television
In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?
As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.
In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.
Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes
Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages
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Comment (0)Christopher Small: Musicking: The Means of Performing and Listening (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, culture, ethnomusicology, music, philosophy
Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. In this new book, Small outlines a theory of what he terms “musicking,” a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower.
Using Gregory Bateson’s philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity. This engaging and deftly written trip through the concert hall will have readers rethinking every aspect of their musical worlds.
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1998
ISBN 0819522570, 9780819522573
Length 230 pages
B. Jack Copeland (ed.): The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life. Plus the Secrets of Enigma (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, artificial life, computing, history of computing, logic, mathematics, philosophy, turing machine
Alan Turing, pioneer of computing and WWII codebreaker, is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume for the first time his key writings are made available to a broad, non-specialist readership. They make fascinating reading both in their own right and for their historic significance: contemporary computational theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life all spring from this ground-breaking work, which is also rich in philosophical and logical insight. An introduction by leading Turing expert Jack Copeland provides the background and guides the reader through the selection.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2004
ISBN 0198250800, 9780198250807
Length 613 pages
David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital culture, film theory, new media, philosophy, philosophy of history, postmodernism, poststructuralism, semiotics, utopia
In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.
Publisher Duke University Press, 2001
Series: Post-contemporary interventions
ISBN 0822327228, 9780822327226
Length 276 pages
