Jacques Rancière: Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, biopolitics, biopower, democracy, ontology, philosophy, politics, subjectivation
“Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière’s most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.
In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière’s ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a ‘politics of art’ might be.
This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers.”
Edited and Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Continuum, London/New York, Jan 2010
ISBN 1847064450, 9781847064455
240 pages
Reviews: Todd May (NDPR), David W. Hill (Marx & Philosophy).
PDF (updated on 2024-2-20)
Comment (0)Salomé Voegelin: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, noise, philosophy, silence, sound art, sound recording
“Listening to Noise and Silence engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salomé Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility.
A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow.
Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. Listening to Noise and Silence broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.”
Publisher Continuum, London and New York, 2010
Music/Sound Studies series
ISBN 1441162070, 9781441162076
256 pages
Reviews: Daniela Cascella (Journal of Sonic Studies), Brian Kane (NonSite).
PDF (updated on 2018-4-30)
Comment (1)Alain Badiou: Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998–)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, philosophy, philosophy of art, truth
“Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.
Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.
Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett.”
Originally published in French as Petit manuel d’inesthetique, Seuil, Paris, 1998
Translated by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2004
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804744092, 9780804744096
168 pages
PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)
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