Browse

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the importance of aesthetics. Eating is often dismissed as a necessary aspect of survival, and our personal enjoyment of food is considered a quirk. Nicola Perullo sees food as the only portion of the world we take in on a daily basis, constituting our first and most significant encounter with the earth. Perullo has long observed people’s food practices and has listened to their food experiences. He draws on years of research to explain the complex meanings behind our food choices and the thinking that accompanies our gustatory actions. He also considers our indifference toward food as a force influencing us as much as engagement. For Perullo, taste is value and wisdom. It cannot be reduced to mere chemical or cultural factors but embodies the quality and quantity of our earthly experience.

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher’s fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers. Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjöholm draws a clear line from Arendt’s consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia. This delicate effort allows Sjöholm to revisit Arendt’s political concepts of freedom, plurality, and judgment from an aesthetic point of view and incorporate Arendt’s insight into current discussions of literature, music, theater, and visual art. Though Arendt did not explicitly outline an aesthetics, Sjöholm’s work substantively incorporates her perspective into contemporary reckonings with radical politics and their relationship to art.

Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century pietistic traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, this book unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, it revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. It engages with three critical categories: aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere, tracing the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, the book also extends to France through Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the “sensible” individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, this book considers the intellectual's “aesthetic idea” and “thought specular” in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. It revisits Kristeva's reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a “stuck” existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, this book positions creative acts as a form of “spiritual inoculation” against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection.

This book provides a philosophical analysis of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and connects the predicament of the novella's central character to Western thought's most compelling questions. The book explains that Mann's work is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. It considers both the novella and a number of other works of art that have been adapted from it, including Benjamin Britten's opera and Luchino Visconti successful film. It describes the main themes of Mann's story, in which the character Gustav von Aschenbach becomes captivated by an adolescent boy, first seen on the lido in Venice, the eventual site of Aschenbach's own death. It explains how Mann uses the story to work through central concerns about how to live, themes that had been explored by his German predecessors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The book considers how Mann's, Britten's, and Visconti's treatments illuminate the tension between social and ethical values and an artist's sensitivity to beauty. It shows how each work asks whether a life devoted to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of lasting achievements can be sustained and whether a breakdown of discipline undercuts its worth. The book also highlights that Aschenbach's story helps us reflect on whether it is possible to achieve anything in full awareness of our finitude and in knowing our successes are always incomplete.

This book examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world. The book considers the aesthetics of Susan Sontag in greater detail. It details how in On Photography (1977), Sontag argues that a photograph of a person who is suffering only aestheticizes the suffering for the viewer's pleasure. It also highlights how Sontag insists in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that such a photograph can have a sustainable moral-political effect precisely because of its aesthetics. The book considers this dramatic change to be symptomatic of a cultural shift in our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It discusses these issues in connection with Gerhard Richter's and Doris Salcedo's art, which is chosen because it is often identified with the anti-aesthetic, even though it is clearly aesthetic. The book reveals the place of critique in contemporary art and confirms that it is integral to art. Finally, it advocates a critical aesthetics that confirms the limitless power of art.

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, the book traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other. Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. The book explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects their aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of the painters. From here, it travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities. The book ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession. Rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred, it considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the Western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. The book ultimately challenges the primacy of the “European gaze” and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by Western philosophy.

Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. This book illuminates the vegetal centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical specimens that correspond to twelve significant philosophers, it recasts the development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age, this text reclaims the organic heritage of human thought.

This book argues that the concept of “afterness” is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to “follow” something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Immanuel Kant, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed “after Auschwitz.” The book’s various analyses illuminate Lyotard’s apodictic statement that “after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the after.” The book demonstrates, that much hinges on our interpretation of the “after”.