Cosmopolitics And Biopolitics Ethics And Aesthetics In Contemporary Art

Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics seeks to trace cosmopolitical aesthetics understood not only as the union of art, science, and the right to survive, but also as the prism through which artistic practices are developed around questions connected to transculturality, migration, nomadism, post-gender subjectivities, social and natural sustainability, and new digital technologies. This book’s authors fashion a narrative that moves in the territory of “inbetweenness”, between hospitality and hostility, between welcoming and conflict, between languages and intermediate languages, science, and survival in a world that is “common” more than global.

What role might art exert in light of the challenges posed by climate change, resource depletion, and the diverse political and cultural crises our societies face in the twenty-first century? The hypothesis guiding this book is born of Félix Guattari’s claim that in confronting the multi-faceted problems of our global political economy we need to develop a more complex analysis of nature, culture and technology, shifting from catastrophic, end-of-the world narratives to productive, generative, trans-species alliances for the sake of the sustainability of life on the planet. Because capitalism is no longer understood merely as a mode of production but as a system of semiotization, homogenization, and of transmission of forms of power over goods, labour and individuals, only the emergence of other relational subjective formations would be able to counteract the fixation of desire towards capital and its diverse crystallizations of power. New social practices, new aesthetic practices and new practices of the self in relation to the other are summoned to undertake an ethical-political reinvention of life. As Guattari argues, it is about reappropiating universes of value and paving the way for the emergence of processes of singularization involving a mutating subjectivity, a mutating socius, and a mutating environment. This book is engaged in thinking about the conjunction of the ecological turn in contemporary art and the attention given to matter in recent humanist scholarship as a way of exploring how new configurations of the world suggest new ways of being and acting in that world. Contributors investigate the means by which art can act as an existential catalysist, providing ways of changing our modes of relation beyond traditional modes of representation and, in doing so, instituting transformation.

This book presents a study of the figure of the stranger in US Latinx literary and cultural forms, ranging from contemporary novels through essays to film and transborder art activism. The focus on this abject figure is twofold: first, to explore its potential to expose the processes of othering to which Latinxs are subjected; and, second, to foreground its epistemic response to neocolonial structures and beliefs. Thus, this book draws on relevant sociological literature on the stranger to unveil the political and social processes behind the recognition of Latinxs as ‘out of place.’ On the other hand, and most importantly, this volume follows the path of neo-cosmopolitan approaches to bring to the fore processes of interrelatedness, interaction, and conviviality that run counter to criminalizing discourses around Latinxs. Through an engagement with these theoretical tenets, the goal of this book is to showcase the role of the Latinx stranger as a cosmopolitan mediator that transforms walls into bridges.

This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism. Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology. Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez. Contributors Cordelia E. Barrera Mary Pat Brady Norma E. Cantú María Jesus Castro Dopacio Carlos Nicolás Flores Myrriah Gómez Maria Magdalena Guerra de Charur Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs Georgina Guzmán Cristina Herrera María Esther Quintana Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson Meagan Solomon Lourdes Torres Raquel Valle-Sentíes Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text. In re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author's own introduction, mirroring the multiple interpretations within the essays themselves.

A study of art's drive to blur art and life and to transform the latter, through the lens of modern biopower. Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art's drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state's biologized control of life. Art's ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower's aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. In these intersecting yet different orientations toward life, this book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state? From today's “creative cities” to the birth of modern democracy and art in the French Revolution, Art and (Bare) Life explores how the Enlightenment's discovery of life itself is mirrored in politics and art. The galvanizing revelation that we are, in Michel Foucault's words, “a living species in a living world,” free to alter our environment to produce specific effects, is compared here to the discovery that art is an autonomous system that can be piloted toward its own self-determined ends—art for art's sake. But when both art and the capitalist state seek to change life rather than reflect it, they find themselves set on a collision course.

"This volume provides the first critical comparison of Michel Foucault's aesthetics of existence and Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics. Introduced by a comprehensive overview of the concepts by the editors, the ensuing chapters build on the interdisciplinary character of both ideas, beyond a narrow focus on art and beauty, exploring a wide range of topics ranging from politics to the philosophy of sexuality. This volume reveals not only the important role Foucault's philosophy has played in Shusterman's work, but also how recent developments in somaesthetics and somapower present a complement, or even alternative, to Foucault's notions of biopower and biopolitics"--

This forum of current discussions of ethics and aesthetics addresses a cross-section of disciplines including literary theory, philosophy, women's studies, postcolonial theory, art history, Holocaust studies, theology, and others. Contributors, ranging from philosophers and literary critics to practicing artists and art curators, answer such questions as: In the age of the collapse of metaphysics, what is the relation between philosophical reflection and art? If we question the privilege accorded to the aesthetic, can ethics alone offer a solution to the crisis of representation? Is it possible and ethically viable to represent the other in speech and image? What happens at the conjunction of aesthetics and politics? Can one speak of aesthetic configurations of the space of community? Are the concepts of ethics and aesthetics gendered and repressive of sexual difference? Considering the many works that consider either ethics or aesthetics almost exclusively within the confines of particular disciplines, this collection crosses the boundaries and continues the debate outside the rigid parameters of specialized discourses.