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A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) offers over two-dozen meditations on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that "encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence." Following an introduction, the book begins with two short essays on the works of the American painter Edward Hopper, an artist venerated by Adams. The rest of this compilation contains essays-more than half of which have never before been published-that contemplate one work or a small group of works by an individual artist. Many of the objects discussed are by noted photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Abelardo Morell, Edward Ranney, Judith Joy Ross, John Szarkowski, and Garry Winogrand. Several essays beckon the words of literary figures, including Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz. Adams's voice is at once intimate and accessible, and is imbued with the accumulated wisdom of a long career devoted to making and viewing art. This eloquent and moving book champions art that fights against disillusionment and despair.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and experience pleasure or why it has always been considered inferior to actual theoretical knowledge. Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into the history of philosophy and reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, Agamben critically recovers the roots of one of Western culture's cardinal concepts. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice. This volume will not only engage the author's devoted fans in philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Nymphae--Die Passion der Faktizität--Eintäusserte Manier.

In 1900, Dutch art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: "A fantastic figure - shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? What is the meaning of it all - Who is the nymph? Where does she come from?" Warburg's response: "In essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile, " serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography. In "Nymphs", the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess, " while the concept of "elemental spirit, " ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography. Tracing the genealogy of this idea, Agamben goes on to examine subjects as diverse as the aesthetic theories of choreographer Domineco da Piacenza, Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay on the "symbol, " Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectic image, and the bizarre discoveries of photographer Nathan Lerner in 1972. From these investigations emerges a startlingly original exploration of the ideas of time and the image. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and "Nymphs" will engage not only the author's devoted fans in philosophy, legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism, but his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Editor's note
• Editor's introduction
• Part I. Language: 1. The thing itself
• 2. The idea of language
• 3. Language and history: linguistic and historical categories in Benjamin's thought
• 4. Philosophy and linguistics
• 5. Kommerell, or on gesture
• Part II. History: 6. Aby Warburg and the nameless science
• 7. Tradition of the immemorial
• 8. *Se: Hegel's absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis
• 9. Walter Benjamin and the demonic: happiness and historical redemption
• 10. The messiah and the sovereign: the problem of law in Walter Benjamin
• Part III. Potentiality: 11. On potentiality
• 12. The passion of facticity
• 13. Pardes: the writing of potentiality
• 14. Absolute immanence
• Part IV. Contingency: 15. Bartleby, or on contingency
• Notes
• Index of names.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is a collection of pivotal essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In "Profanations", Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our time. In ten essays, Agamben ponders a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon.The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent concern with the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering: the talking cricket in Pinocchio; "helpers" in Kafka's novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of "Rosebud, " the infamous object of obsession in Citizen Kane. "In Praise of Profanity, " the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. Agamben not only provides a new and potent theoretical model but describes it with a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links among literature, politics, and philosophy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Translator's notes
• 1. The most uncanny thing
• 2. Frenhofer and his double
• 3. The man of taste and the dialectic of the split
• 4. The cabinet of wonder
• 5. 'Les jugements sur la poesie ont plus de valeur que la poesie'
• 6. A self-annihilating nothing
• 7. Privation is like a face
• 8. Poiesis and praxis
• 9. The original structure of the work of art
• 10. The melancholy angel
• Notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In this book, one of Italy s most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the death of art (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a self-annulling mode. With astonishing breadth and originality, the author probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. In essence, he argues that the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter, for example that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Arts in Our World
• Chapter 3: Marxist Aesthetics, or, the Politics and Morals of Art
• Chapter 4: Aesthetics and Its Relation to Other Fields
• Chapter 5: Reason, Truth, Metaphysics
• Chapter 6: The Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
• Chapter 7: The Rational Unity of Art, Aesthetics, and Art Appreciation Bibliography of Works cited Index of Artworks Index of Names Index of Subjects.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book is a first attempt to cover the whole area of aesthetics from the point of view of critical rationalism. It takes up and expands upon the more narrowly focused work of E. H. Gombrich, Sheldon Richmond, and Raphael Sassower and Louis Ciccotello. The authors integrate the arts into the scientific world view and acknowledge that there is an aesthetic aspect to anything whatsoever. They pay close attention to the social situatedness of the arts. Their aesthetics treats art as emerging from craft in the form of luxurious and playful challenge to the audience. In developing it they place emphasis on the number of questions and claims that can be settled by appeal to empirical facts; on the historical character of aesthetic judgements; and on the connection of aesthetic truth to true love and true friendship, i.e. fidelity and integrity, not to informative truth.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Intro; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction;
• Chapter 1: Notes on Totalitarianism; A Critique of Dominant Understandings of "totalitarianism"; Classical vs. Advanced Totalitarianism; Totalitarian Mechanization and Standardization; Closing;
• Chapter 2: The Production of Space; Space as Production; Lefebvre's Spatial Dialectic; Dominated Space;
• Chapter 3: Spatial Technologies of Power; Transparency; "Enlightenment Is Totalitarian"; Panopticism; I; II; III; The Gaze; Heterotopia or the Poetics of Spatial Aura;
• Chapter 4: Conceptualizing Aura; The Indefinability of Aura

• Aura as a Negative NotionAura as Trace; Returning the Gaze; Lost Trace; Aura as Veil; Aura as Distance; Conclusion;
• Chapter 5: The Destruction of Aura and Its Political Implications; Auralessness and New Absolutism; Fetish vs. Aura; Renavigation;
• Chapter 6: Images and the Production of Totalitarian Space; Images as Means of Creating Hyperreality; Images as Means of Panopticism; Images as Means of Producing and Maintaining the Omnipresent Cult; Images as Repetitive Patterns Simulating Spatial Sameness; The Commodity and the Spectacle

• Chapter
• 7: In the Absence of Aura: Spatial Dialectics of Despair and HopeAuratic Negativity and Space; I; II; III; IV; V; Notes; References; Index