The Hallelujah Effect

This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.

This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.

Gunther Anders' Philosophy of Technology is the first comprehensive exploration of the ground-breaking work of German thinker Gunther Anders. Anders' philosophy has become increasingly prescient in our digitised, technological age as his work predicts the prevalence of social media, ubiquitous surveillance and the turn to big data. Anders' ouevre also explored the technologies of nuclear power and the biotech concerns for the human and transhuman condition which have become so central to current theory. Babette Babich argues that Anders offers important resources on streaming digital media through his writings on radio, television and film and is, unusually, both a comprehensive and profound thinker. Anders' relationship with key philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and his thinking on Goethe, Nietzsche and Rilke is also explored with a focus on the deep impact he made on his peers. It reflects specifically on the intersection of Anders' thought Heidegger and the Frankfurt school and how influential a figure he was on the landscape of 20th century philosophy. A compelling rehabilitation of a thinker with profound contemporary relevance.

Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses. “With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy

Acclaimed music journalist Alan Light follows the improbable journey of Cohen's "Hallelujah" straight to the heart of popular culture and gives insight into how great songs come to be, how they come to be listened to, and how they can be forever reinterpreted.

Wang Guangyi, one of the stars of the new wave of Chinese art, has artistically addressed major philosophical trends in Western philosophy while drawing on Taoism, Marxism and Maoism. By bringing together a team of experts in the philosophy of art to discuss his work, The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi presents the first philosophical exploration of Wang's art, his thought and his analysis of Chinese society. From his use of words in images to his reference to the classics of Western painting, contributors set Wang's work against key questions in contemporary art. As well as answering what makes the language of pop art successful, they examine whether art and its history have come to an end, as Hegel posited, and if it is possible or even necessary to rework a new narrative for the history of contemporary art. The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi marks an important contribution to understanding the background, work and ideas of a 21st-century political artist outside the West.