{"title":"Columbia Themes In Philosophy Social Criticism And The Arts","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore critical perspectives on society, philosophy, and the arts with this thought-provoking collection. Perfect for readers seeking intellectual stimulation and challenging contemporary discourse. Browse titles now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"videophilosophy-book-maurizio-lazzarato-9780231175395","title":"Videophilosophy","description":"The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has earned international acclaim for his analysis of contemporary capitalism, in particular his influential concept of immaterial labor and his perceptive writings on debt. In Videophilosophy, he reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. First written in French and published in Italian and later revised but never published in full, this book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato’s thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.  Drawing on Bergson, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, and the film theory and practice of Dziga Vertov, Lazzarato constructs a new philosophy of media that ties political economy to the politics of aesthetics. Through his concept of “machines that crystallize time,” he argues that the proliferation of digital technologies over the past half-century marks the transition to a new mode of capitalist production characterized by unprecedented forms of subjection. This new era of the commodification of the self, Lazzarato declares, demands novel types of political action that challenge the commercialization and exploitation of time. This crucial text by an essential contemporary thinker offers vital new perspectives on aesthetics, politics, and media and critical theory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49727746048273,"sku":"NGR9780231175395","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231175396.jpg?v=1751429500"},{"product_id":"public-art-and-the-fragility-of-democracy-book-fred-evans-9780231187596","title":"Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy","description":"Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work’s aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy’s openness allows public art to explore its values critically and to suggest new ones. However, it also facilitates artworks that can surreptitiously or fortuitously undermine democratic values. Today, as bigotry and authoritarianism are on the rise and democratic movements seek to combat them, as Confederate monuments fall and sculptures celebrating diversity rise, the struggle over the values enshrined in the public arena has taken on a new urgency.  In this book, Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society. Through close considerations of Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial, Evans shows how a wide range of artworks participate in democratic dialogues. A nuanced consideration of contemporary art, aesthetics, and political theory, this book is a timely and rigorous elucidation of how thoughtful public art can contribute to the flourishing of a democratic way of life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738230137105,"sku":"NGR9780231187596","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231187599.jpg?v=1751070782"},{"product_id":"looking-through-images-book-emmanuel-alloa-9780231187930","title":"Looking Through Images","description":"Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. 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The work redefines the terms of power, seduction, and morality, and the resulting conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and romanticism.  The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart's opera in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century. The prominent scholars in this collection address the opera's impact on the philosophical visions of Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Williams and its influence on the literary and dramatic works of Pushkin, Hoffmann, Morike, Byron, Wagner, Strauss, and Shaw. Through a close and careful analysis of Don Giovanni's literary and philosophical reception and its many appropriations, rewritings, and retellings, these contributors treat the opera as a vantage point from which theory and philosophy can reconsider romanticism's central themes. As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart's brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50050727313681,"sku":"GOR010172625","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51828470546705,"sku":"NGR9780231137546","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231137540.jpg?v=1750694580"},{"product_id":"don-giovanni-moment-book-lydia-goehr-9780231137553","title":"The Don Giovanni Moment","description":"Mozart's Don Giovanni is an operatic masterpiece full of iconic and mythical tensions that still resonate today. 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As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart's brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50112115638545,"sku":"GOR009184984","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346093347089,"sku":"CIN0231137559G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231137559.jpg?v=1750877028"},{"product_id":"head-cases-book-elaine-p-miller-9780231166829","title":"Head Cases","description":"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. 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Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of \"spiritual inoculation\" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347083006225,"sku":"CIN0231166826G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231166826.jpg?v=1750813130"},{"product_id":"art-s-claim-to-truth-book-gianni-vattimo-9780231138505","title":"Art's Claim to Truth","description":"First collected in Italy in 1985, Art's Claim to Truth is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. 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In the book's final section, Vattimo articulates the consequences of reclaiming the ontological status of aesthetics without its metaphysical implications, holding Aristotle's concept of beauty responsible for the dissolution of metaphysics itself. In its direct engagement with the works of Gadamer, Heidegger, and Luigi Pareyson, Art's Claim to Truth offers a better understanding of the work of Vattimo and a deeper knowledge of ontology, hermeneutics, and the philosophical examination of truth.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50419521061137,"sku":"CIN0231138504VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231138504.jpg?v=1751164696"},{"product_id":"artaud-the-moma-book-jacques-derrida-9780231181679","title":"Artaud the Moma","description":"In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art on Antonin Artaud. 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Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years. The opening essay, \"Origin Is the Goal,\" pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. \"Back to Adorno\" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; \"Second Salvage\" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and \"What Is Mechanical Reproduction\" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music. Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. 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Through exploring different articulations of this idea, D’Angelo shows the paradox of aesthetics: art hides that it is art, but in doing so it reveals itself to be art and becomes an assertion about art. When art is concealed, it appears as spontaneous as nature—yet, paradoxically, also reveals its indebtedness to technique. An erudite and surprising tour through aesthetics, philosophy, and art history, Sprezzatura presents a strikingly original argument with deceptive ease.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51150768472337,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51150768636177,"sku":"GOR013204448","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231175825.jpg?v=1751389078"},{"product_id":"brief-history-of-the-masses-book-stefan-jonsson-9780231145268","title":"A Brief History of the Masses","description":"Stefan Jonsson uses three monumental works of art to build a provocative history of popular revolt: Jacques-Louis David's The Tennis Court Oath (1791), James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), and Alfredo Jaar's They Loved It So Much, the Revolution (1989). Addressing, respectively, the French Revolution of 1789, Belgium's proletarian messianism in the 1880s, and the worldwide rebellions and revolutions of 1968, these canonical images not only depict an alternative view of history but offer a new understanding of the relationship between art and politics and the revolutionary nature of true democracy. Drawing on examples from literature, politics, philosophy, and other works of art, Jonsson carefully constructs his portrait, revealing surprising parallels between the political representation of \"the people\" in government and their aesthetic representation in painting. Both essentially \"frame\" the people, Jonsson argues, defining them as elites or masses, responsible citizens or angry mobs. Yet in the aesthetic fantasies of David, Ensor, and Jaar, Jonsson finds a different understanding of democracy-one in which human collectives break the frame and enter the picture.  Connecting the achievements and failures of past revolutions to current political issues, Jonsson then situates our present moment in a long historical drama of popular unrest, making his book both a cultural history and a contemporary discussion about the fate of democracy in our globalized world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51334032818449,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51334035079441,"sku":"CIN0231145268A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51849875030289,"sku":"GOR014426666","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231145268.jpg?v=1760608313"},{"product_id":"afterness-book-gerhard-richter-9780231157704","title":"Afterness","description":"Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of \"afterness\" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. 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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 study's various analyses--across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media--conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that \"after philosophy comes philosophy. 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As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. 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