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Fragments of an Infinite Memory
A deeply informed, yet playful and ironic look at how the internet has changed human experience, memory, and our sense of self, and that belongs on the shelf with the best writings of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. “One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the internet but y...
The Dark Abyss of Time
The field of archaeology continues to face a major crisis of interpretation. The traditional view is that the basic business of archaeology is to reconstruct the history of cultures and civilizations through their material productions. Olivier challenges this view with a new approach to archaeological remains based on the works of French theorists such as Foucault, de Certeaux, and Derrida, with insight from Darwin and Freud. His thesis is that archaeology does not study the past itself but rather what materially remains of the past in our present. Olivier also develops an interpretation of material culture based on Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s work in the anthropology of art. With wider implications for history and all social sciences, The Dark Abyss of Time is a major contribution to the theory of time, memory, heritage, and archaeology. This flawless translation makes Olivier’s elegantly written work available in English for the first time.
Bergson’s Philosophy of Self-Overcoming
This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of élan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of negativity and the swelling nature of time posit a creative process yielding a qualitatively diverse world. This graded oneness is how the lower level activates intensification by turning into limitation, making possible higher levels of achievement, in particular through the union of mind and body and the integration of openness and closed sociability.
Unworking Choreography
There is no archive or museum of human movement, no place where choreographies can be collected and conserved in pristine form. The central consequence of this is the incapacity of philosophy and aesthetics to think of dance as a positive and empirical art. In the eyes of philosophers, dance refers to a space other than art, considered both more frivolous and more fundamental than the artwork without ever quite attaining the status of a work. Unworking Choreography develops this idea and postulates an unworking as evidenced by a conspicuous absence of references to actual choreographic works within philosophical accounts of dance; the late development and partial dominance of the notion of the work in dance in contrast to other art forms such as painting, music, and theatre; the difficulties in identifying dance works given a lack of scores and an apparent resistance within the art form to the possibility of notation; and the questioning of ends of dance in contemporary practice and the relativisation of the very idea that dance artistic or choreographic processes aim at work production.
Brill’s Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare
The adage that an army “marches on its stomach” finds renewed emphasis in this collection of essays. Focusing on military diet and supply from Homer through the Roman Empire, Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare explains regional dietary options and reassesses traditional notions of “provisioning” while exploring topics ranging from strategy and subterfuge to trade and terror. Through fresh insights drawn from current research and excavation spanning the Greco-Roman world, contributors confirm how providing food and drink for soldiers was critical to every army’s success and survival. This volume stimulates reevaluation of ancient militaries and encourages new research.
Microdystopias
This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have on the figuration of our everyday—of microdystopias—and argues that microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in contrast to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an existential sense of shrinking horizons – spatially, temporally, emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our sense of spatial orientation that gradu...
Ways of Re-Thinking Literature
Ways of Re-Thinking Literature creates a unique platform where leading literary thinkers and practitioners provide a multiplicity of views into what literature is today. The texts gathered in this extraordinary collection range from philosophy to poetry, to theater, to cognitive sciences, to art criticism, to fiction, and their authors rank amongst the most significant figures in their fields, in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Topics covered include an assessment of the role of literary narratives in contemporary writing, new considerations on the novel, a redefinition of the "poetic" factor in poetry and life, and a discussion of how literature engages with contemporary ...
A Web of Our Own Making
There no longer seems any point to criticizing the internet. We indulge in the latest doom-mongering about the evils of social media-on social media. We scroll through routine complaints about the deterioration of our attention spans. We resign ourselves to hating the internet even as we spend much of our waking lives with it. Yet our unthinking surrender to its effects-to the ways it recasts our aims and desires-is itself digital technology's most powerful achievement. A Web of Our Own Making examines how online practices are reshaping our lives outside our notice. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is a 'natural technology'-a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention. He shows how and why this technology is reconfiguring knowledge, culture, politics, aesthetics, and theology. The digital revolution is primarily taking place not in Silicon Valley but within each of us.
Warburg Models
Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby Warburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in 1926, organized Warburg's remarkable library. From 1927 Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radical transformation of a disused water tower into the Hamburg Planetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architectural commissioning continued, including projects designed by the avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminating in the construction of the library's present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfah...
Looking Into the Rain
Humankind has a special relationship with rain. The sensory experience of water falling from the heavens evokes feelings ranging from fear to gratitude and has inspired many works of art. Using unique and expertly developed art-historical case studies – from prehistoric cave paintings up to photography and cinema – this book casts new light on a theme that is both ecological and iconological, both natural and cultural-historical. Barbara Baert’s distinctive prose makes Looking Into the Rain. Magic, Moisture, Medium a profound reading experience, particularly at a moment when disruptions of the harmony among humans, animals, and nature affect all of us and the entire planet. Barbara Baert is Professor of Art History at KU Leuven. She teaches in the field of Iconology, Art Theory & Analysis, and Medieval Art. Her work links knowledge and questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and shows great sensitivity to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts.
