Untimely Bodies Untimely Aesthetics

While heteronormativity continues to permeate nearly all threads of the socio-cultural fabric, several early twenty-first-century German films offer insight into how we might challenge that dominance and disrupt its linear construction of time. Examining the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films of the Berlin School, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics foregrounds how queer conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Each film depicts figures that grapple with an unattainable desire for connection, placed in landscapes shaped by hegemonic heteronormative intimacies, and a linear temporal organization of life that conforms to mainstream, traditional rhythms, and milestones. Simone Pfleger proposes a new model for viewing non-normative relationality and intimacies, using the concept of untimeliness as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetics. In these films, untimeliness provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress by charting how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in various spheres: work, love, sex, home, family, and self. Ultimately, Pfleger shows how the texts uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as they make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent. By proposing time as a critical lens through which to investigate our relationships and intimacies, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers a new way to think about film and encourages moviegoers to turn the analysis back toward themselves and their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and adherence to or deviation from normative narratives in their own lives.

While heteronormativity continues to permeate nearly all threads of the socio-cultural fabric, several early twenty-first-century German films offer insight into how we might challenge that dominance and disrupt its linear construction of time. Examining the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films of the Berlin School, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics foregrounds how queer conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Each film depicts figures that grapple with an unattainable desire for connection, placed in landscapes shaped by hegemonic heteronormative intimacies, and a linear temporal organization of life that conforms to mainstream, traditional rhythms, and milestones. Simone Pfleger proposes a new model for viewing non-normative relationality and intimacies, using the concept of untimeliness as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetics. In these films, untimeliness provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress by charting how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in various spheres: work, love, sex, home, family, and self. Ultimately, Pfleger shows how the texts uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as they make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent. By proposing time as a critical lens through which to investigate our relationships and intimacies, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers a new way to think about film and encourages moviegoers to turn the analysis back toward themselves and their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and adherence to or deviation from normative narratives in their own lives.

This volume contains 16 original essays on the aesthetics of the body and bodily experience. Contributors in philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, race studies, feminist theory, medicine and law explore topics from beauty and sexual attractiveness to national identity and the somatic aesthetics of racialised police violence.

Those two developments converge to construct an aesthetic body; that is, in its full etymological sense, a body whose principal functions are the production of sensation and affectivity. This study examines the importance of the body in the determination of sensibility and passion in French culture of the seventeenth century." "The Aesthetic Body will engage readers with interests in literature, philosophy, the history of ideas, the history of science and medicine, cultural history, and political theory of the French early modem period."--Jacket.

Establishes the body's undeniable presence and strangeness as the material out of which human beings are made

The new electronic age has seen a radical transition from book to screen, a development which has obscured the fact that it is not what we see which matters but how we see what we see. We live in a time when the visible needs to be retheorised.Panorama presents a broad analysis of philosophies of the visible in art and culture, particularly in painting, film, photography, and literature. The work of key philosophers--Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze--is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern. Contributors: Zsuzsa Baross, Robert Burch, Alessandro Carrera, Dana Hollander, Lynne Huffer, Volker Kaiser, Reginald Lilly, Robert S. Leventhal, Janet Lungstrum, Ladelle McWhorter, Ludwig Nagl, Anne Tomiche, James R. Watson, Lisa Zucker

Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. 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. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science and somatic methodologies with classical Asian theories of body, mind and action, these essays probe the nature of somatic existence and the role of body consciousness in knowledge, memory and behavior. Deploying somaesthetic perspectives to analyze key aesthetic concepts (such as style and the sublime), he offers detailed studies of embodiment in drama, dance, architecture and photography. The volume also includes somaesthetic exercises for the classroom and explores the ars erotica as an art of living.