Friedrich Kittler: Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (2002–)

“This major new book provides a concise history of optical media from Renaissance linear perspective to late twentieth-century computer graphics. Kittler begins by looking at European painting since the Renaissance in order to discern the principles according to which modern optical perception was organized. He also discusses the development of various mechanical devices, such as the camera obscura and the laterna magica, which were closely connected to the printing press and which played a pivotal role in the media war between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

After examining this history, Kittler then addresses the ways in which images were first stored and made to move, through the development of photography and film. He discusses the competitive relationship between photography and painting as well as between film and theater, as innovations like the Baroque proscenium or “picture-frame” stage evolved from elements that would later constitute cinema. The central question, however, is the impact of film on the ancient monopoly of writing, as it not only provoked new forms of competition for novelists but also fundamentally altered the status of books. In the final section, Kittler examines the development of electrical telecommunications and electronic image processing from television to computer simulations.

In short, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of image production that is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand the prevailing audiovisual conditions of contemporary culture.”

Publisher Merve, Berlin, 2002
Internationaler Merve Diskurs series, 250
ISBN 3883961833, 9783883961835
331 pages

English edition
Translated by Anthony Enns
With an introduction by John Durham Peters
Publisher Polity, 2009
ISBN 0745640915, 9780745640914
vi+250 pages

Reviews: Anthony Enns (Electronic Book Review 2004), Nicholas Gane and Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Theory Culture Society 2006), Kiss (2006, HU), Bohár (HU), Jussi Parikka (2011).

Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)
Worldcat (DE)
Worldcat (EN)

Optische Medien. Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (German, 2002, added on 2016-8-13, removed on 2017-8-10 upon request from publisher – read first two chapters)
Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (English, trans. Anthony Enns, 2009)

Paul Ricœur: Memory, History, Forgetting (2000/2004)

“Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France’s role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history “overly remembers” some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricœur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricœur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricœur’s Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.”

Originally published in French as La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Le Seuil, 2000

Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2004
ISBN 0226713415, 9780226713410
642 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF

Susie Linfield: The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010)

“In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226482529, 9780226482521
344 pages

review (Frances Richard, The Nation)
review (Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian)

Publisher
Google books

PDF, PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)