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Bloomsbury was delighted to attend the 2022 American Society for Aesthetics Conference. In celebration, we put together chapters themed around the conference sessions.
All chapters are hosted on Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics or Bloomsbury History of Modern Aesthetics, two online collections in the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library which bring together primary and secondary material along with a range of pedagogical resources.
Related chapter:
The Nature of Fiction by David A. Davies
In Aesthetics and Literature
David A. Davies looks at several outlier cases to consider the nature and definition of fiction, looking at stylistic and semantic conceptions of fiction, functional theories of fiction, and the idea of a “true fiction”.
Case study:
The Whitened Female Face in Contemporary China by Eva Kit Wah Man
In Case Studies
In this case study, Eva Kit Wah Man considers the question of why whiter skin is valued in contemporary China, looking at what skin tone is thought to denote about a woman’s class, temperament, and emotions.
Digital anthology:
Introduction to Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South by J. Daniel Elam
From Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South
Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South brings together aesthetic and political writing from South East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Read the General Editor’s Introduction here
Related chapter:
Aesthetic and Artistic Value by Sondra Bacharach and James Harold
In The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics
Sondra Bacharach and James Harold examine the moral, political, aesthetic, and cognitive values of art, and consider how the different values interact.
Case study:
Wim Delvoye, Tim by E.M. Dadlez and Laura Sizer
In Case Studies
In this case study, E.M. Dadlez and Laura Sizer consider the artistic value of tattoos, and look at the case of Tim Steiner to consider the status of an artwork that is part of a human body.
Related chapter:
The Beauty of Nature by R.G. Collingwood
In Outlines of a Philosophy of Art
Read a free chapter from Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, a neglected work by R.G. Collingwood, which is exclusively available online as part of the Bloomsbury History of Modern Aesthetics collection.
Introductions to Primary Texts:
Introduction to Samuel Alexander’s Beauty and Other Forms of Value by Michael Rush
Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933) was Samuel Alexander’s final monograph. It drew together many of his ideas on aesthetics that had been published over the preceding decade and weaved them into something greater than the sum of those parts.
Read the introduction to this primary text
Related chapter:
On the Impossibility of Definition by Tiziana Andina
In The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories
Looking at Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances, Andina evaluates the arguments of William Kennick and Morris Weitz, and assesses the strengths of neo-Wittgensteinian criticism. She also considers Arthur Danto’s theory of narrative sentences as well as normalist and documental theories of art.
Case study:
Wedding Cakes by Brian Soucek
In Case Studies
In this case study, Brian Soucek uses the Supreme Court case regarding the cake artist who refused to serve a gay couple to consider whether the wedding cake in question was a form of artistic expression, and, more broadly, whether food can be art.
Related chapter:
The Description of Taste I: Immediacy and Necessity by James Kirwan
In The Aesthetic in Kant: A Critique
This chapter examines the phenomenological question of the conditions Kant lays down for a feeling to lay claim to being a judgement of taste. Kirwan considers Kant’s criteria of subjectivity, universality, and his idea of beauty as aesthetic merit.
Introductions to Primary Texts:
Introduction to Georg Friedrich Meier’s Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason by J. Colin McQuillan
Georg Friedrich Meier’s Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason is the logic textbook that Kant used in his lectures at the University of Königsberg during his teaching career (1755–1796). Meier’s Excerpt is particularly noteworthy because of the way that he incorporates aesthetics into logic.
Read the introduction to this primary text
Bloomsbury Philosophy Library includes a selection of primary texts, secondary literature, and exclusive articles exploring the relationship between film and philosophy. The content below offers an introduction to some of the key thinkers and contentious debates.
What can film teach us about philosophy? Find out how it is possible to use philosophy to better appreciate films.
Cinema I is the first volume of Deleuze's revolutionary work on the theory of cinema. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze identified his work as “a logic of the cinema”, setting out to “isolate certain cinematographic concepts” philosophically. To do this, he brings together a wide range of examples from a variety of major filmmakers, including Ingmar Bergman, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others.
You can read Irene Han’s new introduction to the text here.
Cinema II is Deleuze's second work on cinema, completing the reassessment of the art form begun in Cinema I. Influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze here offers a compelling analysis of the cinematic treatment of time and memory, thought and speech. The work draws on examples from major film makers, including Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, among many others.
You can read Irene Han’s new introduction to the text here.
After we have left the cinema or turned off the television, we may start wondering about the film’s deeper meaning, its themes, moral, or message – for example, what the film tells us about life and death, love, power, sexuality or even the nature of film itself. And even if we don’t look for deeper meaning, we almost certainly form judgments about whether the film was any good, judgments that go beyond mere preference and aspire to objectivity. This suggests that there are three principal activities performed by the thinking film viewer: comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation. In other words, contrary to the familiar disparagement, there is nothing ‘mindless’ about the entertainment films provide.
You can read more about The Thinking Viewer in Aesthetics and Film by Katherine Thomson-Jones here.
New Philosophies of Film welcomes both passionate film enthusiast and dedicated philosophical reader (who may well be one and the same!) and aims to show how the emerging ‘field’ of film and philosophy is one of the most exciting in aesthetics today. It is intended both as an introduction to the dynamic new wave of philosophizing on film, and as an independent contribution to this emerging field of interdisciplinary engagement.
You can read the introduction here.
In Film Fables Jacques Rancière turns his critical eye to the history of modern cinema. Combining an extraordinary breadth of analysis with an attentiveness to detail born from an obvious love of cinema, Rancière shows us new ways of looking at and interpreting film. His analysis moves effortlessly from Eisenstein's and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann's Westerns to Ray's romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini's neo-realism to Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema. The book also includes extended commentaries on the work of Hitchcock, Godard, Vertov and Bergman.
You can read Chapter 10 Documentary Fiction: Marker and the Fiction of Memory, here.
In the first book-length introduction to Deleuze's work on film from a feminist perspective, Teresa Rizzo ranges across Deleuze's books on Cinema and feminist re-workings of his philosophy to re-think the film viewing experience. More than a commentary on Deleuze's books on Cinema, Rizzo's work addresses a significant gap in film theory, building a bridge between the spectatorship studies and apparatus theories of the 1970s, and new theorisations of the cinematic experience. Developing a concept of a 'cinematic assemblage', the book focuses on affective and intensive connections between film and viewer. Through a careful analysis of a range of film texts and genres that have been important to feminist film scholarship, such as the Alien series and the modern horror film, Rizzo puts Deleuze's key concepts to work in exciting new ways.
You can read the Introduction, and Chapter 1 The Cinematic Apparatus and the Transcendental Subject, here.
How is aesthetics relevant to politics? Why study aesthetics in terms of the political? Is an artist ever independent from political reality? Can aesthetics influence environments and our lived experience? Is it possible for aesthetics to become institutionalized?
Bloomsbury Philosophy Library includes a selection of primary texts, secondary literature and exclusive articles connecting aesthetics and politics.
The content below focusses on theories of aesthetics and politics from a variety of time periods and cultural contexts, providing examples across a range of art forms.
Friedrich Shiller offers a powerful example of the ways in which philosophy can speak to its time and become a relevant form of critique. As an artist, Schiller understood his practice as a way of denouncing, subverting and interrupting what he saw as the forms of violence inhabiting his present. As a philosopher, he sought to clarify the sense in which this suspension, interruption, or resistance against violence can take place aesthetically.
In this new introduction to Schiller’s letters, María del Rosario Acosta López’s shows how approaching Schiller on his own terms, and following his own historically located concerns, we can arrive at a reading of his Aesthetic Letters as timely as ever.
You can read the introduction here.
For Schiller our aesthetic frameworks are always already intertwined with the social and political context we live in and they are transformed by it in ways that, in turn, transform our ways of perceiving and understanding the world around us. An attention to the aesthetic as condition of possibility of our experience means therefore, for Schiller, also an uncovering of the kinds of structures that quietly and unperceivably end up a-critically determining the way we act and interpret reality altogether.
This is the reason why, for Schiller, there is no political revolution without a revolution in the way we feel and sense the world. Or, put the other way around, our sensibility and sensitivity to the world are already determined by mechanisms of control and power which condition us in a certain way; they are as historically determined as everything else.
Aesthetics, in Schiller’s work, is the critical outlook par excellence. It is not merely one more topic in addition to ethics and epistemology, as it is for Kant; instead, it opens up and makes possible another ethics and another epistemology, new and distinct ways of knowing, feeling and relating to one another.
Read the Second and Third Letter here.
The 18th century is often said to have involved a radical transformation in the concept of art: from the understanding that art is tool for some practical purpose, to the modern belief that it holds a distinctive and intrinsic value. By exploring the ground between these notions of art’s function, Karl Axelsson reveals how scholars of culture made taste, morals, and a politically stable society an integral part of their claims about the experience of nature and art.
Axelsson re-examines the political relevance of theories by two of the most prolific men of letters in the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Axelsson shows that they were, first and foremost, seeking to fortify a natural link between the aesthetic experience and the consolidation of modern political society.
Political Aesthetics is a wonderful re-write of the history of early eighteenth century British aesthetic thought.
You can read the introduction here.
This one-of-a-kind collection imitates the heterogeneity of Indian aesthetic experience in its unusually diverse range of topics. Not only does it cover contemporary scholarly, historical, creative and comparative extensions, criticisms, and transcreations of “rasa” theory, it presents a philosophy of artistic practices across a wide range of genres - epistemology, phenomenology, ontology, ethics, and politics.
Each essay affords a glimpse of the original philosophical research of a leading thinker in the field of Indian aesthetics right now in early twenty-first century. More than a history of Indian aesthetics and survey of Indian philosophies of art, these essays add new waves to the ocean of Indian reflections on art, aesthetic experience, and practice.
Mahatma Gandhi is widely perceived to be indifferent if not opposed to aesthetic experience. An icon of uncompromising moralism, Gandhi led a sparse life, in the austere surroundings of his ashrams and is assumed to be opposed to aestheticism and the arts that flourish in leisure. Openly critical of Western civilization and its seduction of the senses, Gandhi can be imagined to be out-Plato-ing Plato in denigrating the shadow-world that movies immerse us in.
‘Towards a Gandhian Aesthetics’ explores Mahatma Gandhi’s outwardly dry but inwardly highly emotional aesthetic life, enriched by his relationship to medieval devotional poetry and the Hindi poet Tulsidas.
You can read Tridip Suhrud’s essay here.
Dissensus comprises a series of articles written by Jacques Rancière between 1990 and 2008 in which we learn about two of his most important concepts: the “aesthetics of politics” and the “politics of aesthetics”. The aesthetics of politics refers to the power of dissensual practices which can manifest social change. These are actions in which collective subjects’ exercise their equality and the way in which it is threatened through popular organizations in which existing rights are deployed or new ones are created, to assert denied entitlements and challenge conditions of injustice, creating institutions that allow for the expansion or creation of egalitarian possibilities. For Rancière, emancipation refers precisely to this demonstration of equality that anyone can put into practice, in various manifestations of their capacity.
In this illuminating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a 'politics of art' might be.
You can read chapter 9, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes’, here.
You can read more about the life and work of Jacques Rancière here.
The first academic monograph dedicated solely to Laruelle's unique contribution to aesthetic theory and specifically the 'non-philosophical' project he terms 'non-aesthetics'. This undertaking allows Laruelle to think about art outside the boundaries of standard philosophy, an approach that Fardy explicates through a series of case studies. By analysing the art of figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Anish Kapoor, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell as well as the drama of Michael Frayn, Fardy's new book enables new and experienced readers of Laruelle to understand how the philosopher's thinking can open up new vistas of art and criticism.
You can read the introduction here.
Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic – it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. They are simply two sides of the same coin, both concerned with the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. From this point of view we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, conversely, we can not only let the status quo endure, but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself.
Edited by one of the world's leading scholars in Deleuze Studies and an accomplished artist, curator and critic, this impressive collection of writings by both academics and practicing artists is an exciting imaginative tool.
You can read the introduction here.
Philosophy flourished in the Islamic world for many centuries, and continues to be a significant feature of cultural life today.
Find out more through our free content made available in celebration of World Philosophy Day.
Access articles on all the major and less well-known thinkers of Islamic philosophy since the foundation of the faith, many of which have not previously been profiled or described in English. Every major school of thought, from classical falasifa to Sufi mysticism, is represented, ranging across the early years of the faith to the modern period.
From medicine to mysticism, existentialism to phenomenology, the lives and work of women thinkers have all too often been marginalised in ways that have erased their contributions from the record.
The weight of this historical exclusion has led and continues to lead to creative theoretical responses to art, sexual difference, and lived experience which remain ripe for study and research today.
Bloomsbury Philosophy Library includes a selection of primary texts, secondary literature and exclusive articles exploring the crucial work of women philosophers. The content below opens up our understanding of the role women have played in shaping intellectual thought and philosophy.
When the public figure Simone de Beauvoir picked up her pen she wrote not only for herself but for her readers. Her best-selling autobiographies have been described as embodying a philosophical ambition to show ‘how one’s self is always shaped by others and related to others’. To read more about Beauvoir’s vast and rich contribution to 20th-century philosophy read the chapter, ‘Queen of Existentialism’, from Kate Kirkpatrick’s critical biography of her life, and for a shorter overview of her life’s work read the encyclopedia article on the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers.
Drawing on existentialism’s relevance to the creation of identity, as well as its ability to challenge “essentialist” conceptions of identity, in terms of both the individual self and categories such as gender, race, and culture, The Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism provides a fruitful resource for a range of applications. Read more in the chapters Existentialism, Feminism and Sexuality and Existentialism and the Emotions.
Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715-62). (Credit Alamy © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images)
