These 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy's essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy's work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture.

In an exciting range of original responses to Nancy's work, these 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy's essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy's work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture.

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-?is the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Fran?s G?rd as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abb? and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.

Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.

Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject. The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art. The Handbook guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, degraded, or otherwise indistinct. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture shows how opaque forms of art address problems of mediation, knowledge, and information. It also intervenes in current debates about new systems of visibility and surveillance by explaining how indefinite art provides a critique of the positivist drive behind these regimes. A timely contribution to media theory, cinema studies, American studies, and aesthetics, the book presents a novel and extensive analysis of the politics of transparency.

Jean-Luc Nancy's latest contributions to philosophy compel us to ask: what sort of politics do we have once we are exposed to the finitude of sense? The internationally recognised contributors to this collection illuminate some of the most challenging aspects of Nancy's thought, making previously unexplored connections and offering spirited interpretations. Focussed around three core themes - capitalism, the metaphysics of democracy and aesthetics - these 12 essays emphasise the potential of Nancy's political thought, and collectively situate it within a broader intellectual context which includes engagements with Badiou, Ranciere, Foucault, Agamben and Lefort. It is an essential read for anyone interested in current trends in political philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory and social and political thought.

This book explores the constitutive role alterity plays in identity formation in Western and Eastern traditions. It examines the significance of difference in conceptions of identity across major philosophical and religious traditions in a global and comparative context, considering Ancient Greek and Egyptian, Chinese, Islamic, European and Japanese philosophies. In addition, the book opens up discussion of less dominant trends in philosophical thinking, particularly the spaces between self-same existence and otherness in the histories of philosophical and religious thought. Chapters critique both essentialist and postmodern understandings of self-constitution by questioning the ordinary narrative of identity construction across Western and non-Western traditions. The book also explores the construction of selfhood from a wide range of perspectives, drawing upon individual philosophers (including Plotinus, Descartes, Geulincx, Hume, de Beauvoir and Ueda) as well as religious and philosophical movements, including Confucian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Protestantism and Post-Phenomenology. Differences in Identity in Philosophy and Religion represents a landmark study, drawing together a range of approaches, perspectives and traditions to explore how identity is constructed across the world.

Everything that you need to know about reading, making, and understanding comics can be found in a single Nancy strip by Ernie Bushmiller from August 8, 1959. Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s groundbreaking work How to Read Nancy ingeniously isolates the separate building blocks of the language of comics through the deconstruction of a single strip. No other book on comics has taken such a simple yet methodical approach to laying bare how the comics medium really works. No other book of any kind has taken a single work by any artist and minutely (and entertainingly) pulled it apart like this. How to Read Nancy is a completely new approach towards deep-reading art. In addition, How to Read Nancy is a thoroughly researched history of how comics are made, from their creation at the drawing board to their ultimate destination at the bookstore. Textbook, art book, monogram, dissection, How to Read Nancy is a game changer in understanding how the “simplest” drawings grab us and never leave. Perfect for students, academics, scholars, and casual fans.