Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.

Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.

Parables for the Virtual will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general.

Publisher Duke University Press, 2002
Post-contemporary interventions series
ISBN 0822328976, 9780822328971
328 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (thanks to esco_bar; updated on 2012-7-24)

Roberto Esposito: Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2004/2008)

A significant political theorist advances the discussion of biopolitics.

Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bíos—his first book to be translated into English—builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual—with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers—is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community.

In Bíos, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical transformation of the political into biopolitics. Bíos discusses the origins and meanings of biopolitical discourse, demonstrates why none of the categories of modern political thought is useful for completely grasping the essence of biopolitics, and reconstructs the negative biopolitical core of Nazism. Esposito suggests that the best contemporary response to the current deadly version of biopolitics is to understand what could make up the elements of a positive biopolitics—a politics of life rather than a politics of mastery and negation of life.

In his introduction, Timothy Campbell situates Esposito’s arguments within American and European thinking on biopolitics. A comprehensive, illuminating, and highly original treatment of a critically important topic, Bíos introduces an English-reading public to a philosophy that will critically impact such wide-ranging current debates as stem cell research, euthanasia, and the war on terrorism.

Translated and with an introduction by Timothy Campbell
Originally published as Bíos: Biopolitica e filosofia, 2004, Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
Volume 4 of Posthumanities Series
ISBN 0816649901, 9780816649907
230 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-11-17)

David E. James (ed.): Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (2005)

“Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker is a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements, and reminiscences about the celebrated avant-garde filmmaker who died in 2003. The director of nearly four hundred short films, including Dog Star Man, Parts I-IV, and the Roman Numeral Series, Brakhage is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His shorts eschewed traditional narrative structure, and his innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork, and multiple superimpositions created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s.

Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker chronicles both the director’s personal and formal development. The essays in this book—by historians, filmmakers, and other artists—assess Brakhage’s contributions to the aesthetic and political history of filmmaking, from his emergence on the film scene and the establishment of his reputation, to the early-1980s. The result is a remarkable tribute to this lyrical, visionary artist.”

Publisher Temple University Press, 2005
Wide Angle Books series
ISBN 1592132723, 9781592132720
240 pages

Publisher

PDF (36 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)