Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood.It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the “sex image,” the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this...

A collection of pivotal ideas about beauty from throughout history, with an introduction and critical headnotes.This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia:Plato • Aristotle • Vitruvius • Alberti • Kant • Burke • Fiedler • Nietzsche • Wilde • Bergson • Bell • Scott • Benjamin • Bataille • Sontag • Jameson • Scarry • Nehamas • Zangwill • Freedberg and GalleseWith an i...

If you are disturbed by the idea that to grow up is to learn to live with disillusionment, if you are fascinated by the perplexity of child-rearing, or if you fear you were more creative as a child, The Beast in the Nursery offers an illuminating and possibly life-changing experience.In four interrelated essays, Adam Phillips arrives at startling new insights into issues that preoccupied Freud, showing in the process that far from having lost its relevance, psychoanalysis is still o...

What does it mean to lead a moral life?In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.Butler takes as their starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” They show that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ wh...

Philosophy of Art is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics.It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art.Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both t...

Renowned scholar George Steiner explores the power and presence of the unseen in art. "It takes someone of [his] stature to tackle this theme head-on" ( The New York Times).There is a philosophical school of thought that believes the presence of God in art, literature, and music—in creativity in general—is a vacant metaphor, an eroded figure of speech, a ghost in humanity's common parlance. George Steiner posits the opposite—that any cohe...

As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. The Portable Kristeva is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, incl...

Alongside Living Powers and A is for Aesthetic this book is intended to establish a conceptual frame for the Arts in Education series. The first and primary aim of this symposium is to put teachers of all the arts in touch with some of the most recent and the best writing on the nature of art.

Merleau-Ponty was a pivotal figure in twentieth century French philosophy. He was responsible for bringing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers - Husserl and Heidegger - to France and instigated a new wave of interest in this approach. His influence extended well beyond the boundaries of philosophy and can be seen in theories of politics, psychology, art and language.This is the first volume to bring together a comprehensive selection of Merleau-Ponty's writing.

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology.Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfactio...

An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan.Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidabl...

The only book to cover the evolution of one of the most important areas of philosophyThe birth of the Enlightenment heralded a new reverence for the power of reason. But as science flourished in Europe, violence and brutality did not abate. In the French Revolution, thousands were guillotined and the death toll was vast. Philosophers asked whether we had become dehumanised by rationality and abstract political theory. Did art and literature provide a way to redisco...