David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (2001)

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
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822327228, 9780822327226
276 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936-) [FR, DE, CZ, RU, SK, ES, PT, EN]

“Benjamin‘s famous ‘Work of Art’ essay sets out his boldest thoughts–on media and on culture in general–in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the ‘Work of Art’ essay–the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays–some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.”

Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin
Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others
Publisher The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA and London, 2008
ISBN 0674024451, 9780674024458
448 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (English, 2008, updated on 2019-12-9)

Versions and translations of the essay “Work of Art..”:
L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction méchanisée (French, trans. Pierre Klossowski, 1936, updated on 2013-1-12)
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (German, 1963, added on 2014-3-10)
Umělecké dílo v době své technické reprodukovatelnosti (Czech, trans. Věra Saudková, 1979, added on 2014-3-10)
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Dritte Fassung (German, 1980, added on 2014-3-10)
Proizvedenie iskusstva v epokhu ego tekhnicheskoy vosproizvodimosti. Izbrannye esse (Russian, trans. S.A. Romashko, 1996, added on 2013-1-12)
Umelecké dielo v epoche svojej technickej reprodukovateľnosti (Slovak, trans. Adam Bžoch, 1999, added on 2014-3-10)
La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica. Urtext (Spanish, trans. Andrés E. Weikert, 2003, added on 2014-3-10)
A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica. 3ª versão (Portuguese, trans. João Barrento, 2006, added on 2014-3-10)

For more versions of the essay see Benjamin’s bibliography on Monoskop wiki.