The MIT Press 2003
264 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262032996
17.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There’s No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud’s ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan’s ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman’s existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought’s illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another’s, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention.
In the book’s first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone’s burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas’s final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation’s adversary--the cruelly uncreative superego—-as Copjec analyzes Kant’s concept of radical evil, envy’s corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini’s Salò, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Price: £19.95
360 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262072416
18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype.
Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art. His analysis draws on the work of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future. Price: £29.95
Continuum 2003
180 pages 50 B&W reproductions. ISBN 0826461824
15.5 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
Art in Question explores the role of contemporary art within today's wider visual culture. This richly illustrated book brings together a series of specially commissioned interviews with leading, international artists, art historians, theorists and curators:
Bill Viola
Griselda Pollock
Richard Wentworth
Barbara Kruger
Sadie Plant
Okwui Enwezor
Martin Kemp
WJT Mitchell
Hani Rashid
Art has always been argued over, never more than in our own times. Today, the parameters of art are being redefined by new ideas about what really constitutes art, by new technologies, by new cultural perceptions of race and gender, by new theories about the role of the artist and by a changing museum culture. Price: £16.99
OUT OF STOCK
Pluto Press 2003
176 pages ISBN 074532021X
13.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
'All opponents of globalization should carry it in their luggage.' Le Monde / Raoul Vaneigem is an iconic figure in French philosophy. One of the founding fathers -- along with Guy Debord -- of the Situationist movement, his writings helped trigger the events of May 1968. After the inevitable Situationist split, Vaneigem pursued his own interests, and he has since established a unique place in the world of French political thought. In this new book, he sets out quite literally to create a new declaration of human rights, by updating earlier declarations -- from the French Revolution to the UN declaration in 1948 -- on the grounds that 'we can no longer make do with the liberties derived from free exchange, while the free circulation of capital is establishing a tyranny that reduces humankind and the earth to a commodity.' By turns playful, poetic and provocative, this is a remarkable book that makes a profoundly serious point about the way in which human rights have been eroded by globalization. Price: £14.99
112 pages ISBN 082646081X
14 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
Virilio traces the twin development of art and science in the twentieth century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death. In Virilio's scorching vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form. At the start of the 21st Century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godess manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monsterous forms of life. Price: £16.99
232 pages ISBN 0826414907
15 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Adorno's classic work on composers Schoenberg and Stravinsky is available again in its original and complete form.
"[Adorno's] interest in Schoenberg and Benjamin was combined in his best known and most influential book...which set out to do for contemporary music what Benjamin had done for seventeenth-century German tragedy."
--The New York Review of Books Price: £14.99
Reaktion 2003
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861891415
15.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and articulate of the Abstract Expressionists. This book, written by a friend of the artist, the well-known writer and critic Mary Ann Caws, examines Motherwell’s way of thinking and writing in relation to his paintings. The artist, American by birth, yet simultaneously American and European in his way of visualizing and vocalizing artistic and philosophical traditions, always worked between these two poles, and it is this tension that imbues his œuvre with its particular intensity.
The author bases her analysis of Motherwell on the artist’s own writings and readings, as well as on extensive conversations and interviews with him. She considers his work and interests in relation to those of other Abstract Expressionists as well as to the work of the Surrealists. Her book highlights his deep attraction to France and French literature and art, and his concern with the idea of elegy and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. His singularly American spirit provided him with a manner of painting and thinking unique among the Abstract Expressionists, as well as with a distinctive and highly personal filter through which to interpret his fascination with European literature and history. Price: £14.95
288 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262011964
17 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Conceptual art was one of the most influential art movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub promoted the artists, curated groundbreaking shows, organized symposia and publications, and in many ways set the stage for another kind of entrepreneur: the freelance curator. Alberro examines both Siegelaub's role in launching the careers of artists who were making "something from nothing" and his tactful business practices, particularly in marketing and advertising.
Alberro draws on close readings of artworks produced by key conceptual artists in the mid- to late 1960s. He places the movement in the social context of the rebellion against existing cultural institutions, as well as the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world. The book ends with a discussion of one of Siegelaub's most material and least ephemeral contributions, the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which he wrote between 1969 and 1971. Designed to limit the inordinate control of collectors, galleries, and museums by increasing the artist's rights, the Agreement unwittingly codified the overlap between capitalism and the arts. Price: £23.50
Hatje Cantz 2003
460 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 377579090X
16.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Today the procedural mechanisms of urban studies are working to interpret new urban paradigms that a century ago where largely absent in a great many cities around the world. African cities are becoming the exemplars for the emergence of new urban formations that are of great interest to many researchers working in the social sciences. This interest has brought into critical light how new urban agglomerations, arrangements, and institutions are emerging from the inadequacies of the public sector, proposing a modernizing cultural revision and a rearrangement of many of the essential elements of familial identification and authority. Out of these transformations, many of which are improvisatory, new types of relations and exchanges, survival and subsistence, forms of solidarity and resistance are produced. It is in the polymorphous and apparently chaotic logic of the postcolonial city that we may find the signs and new codes of expression of new urban identities in formation. Under Siege: Four African Cities underlines a central paradox that seems to rule the view of African cities, namely their inherent dynamism and obsolescence, and engages different kinds of understanding of subjectivity and the cultural, political, social sphere of present day African urban conditions.
Urban Imaginaries from Latin America Price: £22.95
404 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3775790802
16.5 x 24 English text. Softcover
The catastrophic fate of European Jewry during the years of National Socialism in Germany and the subsequent calamity of the holocaust for both Jews and other minorities under the Third Reich have continued to press on contemporary thinkers and historians the difficult task of coming to terms with its features. While the holocaust or Shoah remains representative of a form of state crime, its overwhelming singularity is today tested by many cases of state impunity, systemic violence, repression, war crimes, and gross human rights violations - especially in the Balkan and Rwanda. In the wake of the debates around such violations new and formidable categories of jurisprudence are emerging in which such notions as transitional justice, global justice, and universal jurisdiction are working to reshape the nature of judicial sovereignty on the one hand and accountability on the other in the post-cold war period. Experiments with Truth engages with the viccissitudes of the emerging debates around "Truth and Reconciliation," new forms of gobal justice, testimonies and memories of communities. In this volume a wide range of intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and historians respond to the challenge of transitional justice in often difficult but illuminating ways. Price: £22.95
224 pages ISBN 0826460798
Are contemporary art theorists and critics speaking a language that has lost its meaning? Is it still based on concepts and values that are long out of date? Does anyone know what the function of the arts is in modern society?
Roy Harris breaks new ground with his linguistic approach to the key issues. He situates those issues within the long-running debate about the arts and their place in society which goes back to the Classical period in ancient Greece. Contributors to the debate included some of the most celebrated artists and philosophers of their day--Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo, Kant, Hegel, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix--but none of these eminent figures or their supporters provided a reasoned overview examining the multilingual development of Western artspeak as a whole. Nor did they develop any explicit account of the relationship between the arts and language.
The Necessity of Artspeak shows for the first time that what have usually been considered problems of aesthetics and artistic justification often have their source in the linguistic assumptions underlying the terms and arguments presented. It also shows how artspeak has been--and continues to be--manipulated to serve the interests of particular social groups and agendas. Until the semantics of artspeak is more widely understood, the public will continue to be taken in by the latest fads and fashions that propagandists of the art world promote. Price: £16.99
Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers/Continuum 2002
224 pages ISBN 0826459919
14.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
"The Philosophical Imaginary teaches us how to read philosophy afresh. Focusing on central, but often undiscussed, images, Le Doeuff's patient, perspicacious, and always brilliant readings show us how to uncover the political unconscious at work in great philosophy. Le Doeuff's contribution to philosophy and feminism is unequalled. This book is a classic."
Toril Moi
"Le Doeuff dares to challenge the idea that philosophy can be separated from myth, literature and 'the image'. She shows not only that philosophers do 'think in images', but that there exists a specifically 'philosophical imaginary'. Her readings of Descartes, Kant, More and others show how acknowledging this reliance on 'the image' has the capacity to enrich philosophy by opening it up to continuities with everyday life. The manner in which these essays treat important ethical, epistemological and political questions has led the way for the radical reform of the practice of philosophy."
Moira Gatens
The Philosophical Imaginary stands as one of the most original critiques of the history of philosophical practice and one of the most persuasive analyses of the potential of philosophy. Exploring a wide range of texts, Le Doeuff argues both that there is a necessary recourse to images on the part of even the most rational of philosophers, and that there is a specifically philosophical stock of images - 'the philosophical imaginary'.
Michele Le Doeuff is a Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and has been Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Geneva.
Colin Gordon is the translator of the volume. Price: £16.99
