CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> is pleased to announce
the publication of the following new book reviews:
* Krzysztof Ziarek (2004) The Force of Art. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. Reviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota.
Against claims about the exhaustion and irrelevance of art these days,
Krzysztof Ziarek argues in The Force of Art that art in fact works as
radical critique within contemporary technological reality whenever it
opens up ‘the possibility of thinking not only beyond the currently
existing forms of power but also … beyond the very idea of being as
power’. This notion pays heed to Heidegger’s warning that technology
demands reflection beyond its ‘instrumental and anthropological
definition’, beyond tools, machinery, media, and human purposes.
Technological reality is understood instead as an ontological affair, a
mode of relating with being which, depending as it does on the
unconcealment of being, is ‘never a human handiwork, anymore than is the
realm which man traverses every time he as a subject relates to an
object’. Heidegger’s designation of art as a realm appropriate for
‘essential reflection’ and ‘decisive confrontation’ with technology is
taken up by Ziarek for a rethinking of what it means to critique, to
call into question or to challenge domination in the current
‘Information Age’.
* Peter Hallward (2006) Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of
Creation. London and New York: Verso. Reviewed by Gregory J. Seigworth.
Upon finishing Peter Hallward's Out of this World, one is left with the
after-image of a Deleuze depopulated - unmoored from the actual, adrift
in the pure virtual, a deserted island, or at the very least a Robinson
Crusoe. Although it is not altogether clear whether Hallward entirely
fancies himself as Friday to Deleuze's Crusoe, there might be something
mirrored in Deleuze's claim that 'one could hardly imagine a more boring
novel' than Robinson Crusoe, and Hallward's complaint in the opening
pages of his own book about 'the monotony of the underlying logic of
Deleuze's philosophy'. The punchline for Deleuze is that 'any healthy
reader dreams of seeing Friday eat Robinson'. Hallward's own punchline
in regard to Deleuze might read, however, a great deal more like Hegel's
pronouncement on Spinoza's death by consumption, namely that it was 'in
harmony with his system of philosophy, according to which all
particularity and individuality pass away in the one substance'. As
Hallward has it, ‘Deleuze is most appropriately read as a spiritual,
redemptive, or subtractive thinker, a thinker pre-occupied with the
mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialisation'. Thus, in Hallward's
reading, Deleuze appears as a philosopher of 'contemplative and
immaterial abstraction' and as a proponent of an unanchored 'absolute
creation'-ism, where the world in all its 'fleshy materialism' and
creatural life is progressively consumed by the subtractive vaporousness
of the virtual - until finally Deleuze, as Crusoe, devours himself.
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1. Go to <http://www.culturemachine.net>
2. Click on the ‘E-journal’ blue button
3. Click on the ‘Reviews’ purple button at the bottom of the screen.
CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> publishes new work from
both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed
and has an International Editorial Advisory Board which includes
Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg,
Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster,
Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle, Tadeusz Slawek and Kenneth Surin.
--
Dr Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK
My website: http://www.joannazylinska.net
Reviews Editor for Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net
New book:
Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the
Holocaust
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/5146.html
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