Jean-François Lyotard: Discourse, Figure (1971/2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, language, phenomenology, philosophy, philosophy of art, poetry, psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism
“Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.
A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.”
Originally published in French as Discours, figure by Klincksieck, 1971
Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon
Introduction by John Mowitt
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Cultural Critique Books
ISBN 0816645655, 9780816645657
512 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-11-4)
Comment (0)Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, epistemology, impressionism, literary criticism, literature, mimesis, photography, poetry
Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.
Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
209 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-5-31)
Comments (2)