検索キーワード： 美学

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them.

Darren Hudson Hick takes us through the pleasure of board games and jigsaw puzzles and inside the values of materiality, care, and agency. Hick moves from pinball machines and first editions to meditative cleaning and pottery to introduce us to key ideas in value theory, everyday aesthetics, virtue theory, and care ethics, alongside findings from psychology, anthropology, and sociology.

Our ability to make a fist is what distinguishes humans from every other species, including primates. The fist has played a crucial role in the birth of language and appears in nearly every form of nonverbal communication. We use our fist to protest oppression, give pleasure, knock on doors, give daps, and (inaccurately) measure our heart. Yet the fist is also a sign of someone on the edge. This book asks what happens when we lean over the edge of what a fist can do and symbolize.

The laboratory came to be a space to study 'facts' as natural phenomena, isolated and separated from emotions and biases. Yet the laboratory is also intertwined with the messy ambiguity of the world and embodies the power and privilege of resources, expertise, and innovation. Laboratory examines the contemporary laboratory and its relation to a host of existential concerns about science, technology, and the environment.

Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse.

No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world.

From the personal, intimate scale of jewelry to the monumental scale of Brutalist architecture, Parnell explores the personality of concrete and how it is embedded and embodied in everyday and familiar objects. He revels in concrete's ambiguity and contradictory qualities, from its sensitivity to the tiniest imprint to its immense compressive strength in hydroelectric dams, and traces how concrete is both the ultimate unaesthetic material as well as the quintessential building block of modernity.

Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and sleazy. Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between ourselves and the world outside.

Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?

A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws...

A deep dive into the joy and power of personal pleasures, quirks, obsessions and bad taste, from zine royalty, Ione Gamble. Most of us consider taste to be a primal instinct. We like the things we like and everything we choose to consume, covet or loathe in our day-to-day lives is dictated by...

When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What’s right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world’s most popular sport—from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport’s social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in...

Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world’s most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance.

Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries.

Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily lives has been comparatively gradual – so gradual, crucially, that it is easy to forget just how much we take it for granted. Every phone has a microphone. Every laptop has a microphone. We are surrounded by microphones. The microphone wields enormous power. But when we're 'on mic' we aren't just powerful, we're vulnerable. Microphones can destroy careers as quickly as make them. The microphone is inextricable from our need to be heard.

يحاول الكاتب الإجابة عن بعض الأسئلة الشائكة، "كيف يرى الناس أنواع الجمال في زمن كهذا؟ هل عالمنا يعيش "أزمة جمال"؟ وزمننا كزمن للتغيير نحو الأفضل يسعى إلى جمال الناس والمجتمع والسياسة والأخلاق، بعد كل القبح الذي أصاب مساحات كثيرة من حياتنا وربما نفوسنا؛ فالكاتب يحاول اكتشاف الجمال متلمسًا العون من علوم مختلفة كعلم النفس واللاهوت والفلسفة والنقد السنيمائي وعلم الدلالة وغيرها.