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The papers in this volume challenge the concept of form and aim to set out, explore and develop different theories and examples of 'the formless'. In so doing, they raise questions of form, and notions of formlessness (as distinct from something called 'the formless'). The starting point for many of the contributors is Georges Bataille's highly influential article entitled 'informe' ('formless'). Here, in a context where art, philosophy and anthropology were merging, Bataille tried to question the idea of formlessness as simply applying to things without form. This book, through a diversity of articles in various domains, asks how and why 'the formless' is such a dominant idea from the nineteenth century onwards and it asks the question: 'what is formless?'
Published to accompany exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 22/5 - 26/8 1996.
Gathering and interpreting material that is not readily available elsewhere, this book discusses the thought of the Japanese Buddhist philosophers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. Stambaugh develops ideas about the self culminating in the concept of the Formless Self as formulated by Hisamatsu in his book The Fullness of Nothingness and the essay "The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness," and further explicated by Nishitani in his book Religion and Nothingness. These works show that Oriental nothingness has nothing to do with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western concept of nihilism. Instead, it is a positive phenomenon, enabling things to be.
In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the “formless” as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics. Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition—a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.
Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.
Bringing together the depth insights of eastern & western traditions, this book places the topic of the self in a new context.
An amazingly succinct and accessible answer to the question “What is enlightenment?”—from one of America's most prominent teachers of Insight Meditation Former Buddhist monk and highly regarded Insight Meditation teacher Rodney Smith describes the process of enlightenment in a way anyone can understand—demonstrating in clear language why we operate with the illusion of separation, how we can move out of it to the realization of emptiness and no-self, and how we can live from that state of awakening. He provides brief, powerful exercises that enable us to challenge the reality of our thoughts in order to free ourselves from the illusion they keep us bound to—all the while steering us away from the temptation to regard spiritual practice as a process of self-improvement or a goal to be obtained. “With systematic precision, and with subtle wisdom born of a lifetime of practice, Rodney Smith uses science, psychology, and traditional Buddhism to explain the unexplainable: the how and why of authentic spiritual awakening . . . an original work by a contemporary spiritual master at the height of his powers.” —Norman Fischer, author of Training in Compassion
In the mid-1960s, artists like Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lynda Benglis began to experiment with formlessness in their materials. The maxim Form follows material," however, was not only proclaimed in the era's avant-garde art: it had a distinct impact on furniture design as well--for example, on Gunnar A. Andersen's experimental polyurethane Portrait of My Mother's Chesterfield Chair of 1964 and Zanotta's famous Sacco beanbag chair of 1968. Edited by Peter Noever, Director of Vienna's MAK museum of applied and contemporary art, this volume is the first to concentrate on formlessness in furniture design. Featuring work from the 1960s through today by such revolutionary figures as Frank Gehry, Gaetano Pesce, Ron Arad and Karim Rashid, it illuminates connections between the historical avant-garde and the applied arts, and tracks the various manifestations of design formlessness to have emerged over the past half century--from Robert Dean's 1967 Sea Urchin chair to today's computer-assisted "blobjects.""
Written by one of Japan's foremost contemporary thinkers and scholars, Zen and Modern Society is the third in a series of essay collections on Zen Buddhism as seen in the context of Western thought. Throughout his career, Masao Abe has articulated the meaning of Zen thought in a uniquely compelling way - at once, true to the original tradition and appropriately relevant to a variety of comparative standpoints, ranging from Biblical Judeo-Christianity to modern existentialism, phenomenology, and postmodernism. As a leading representative of the Kyoto School, which has sought a critical, comparative linking of Eastern and Western thought, Abe has based his approach on constructive, mutually respectful yet critical intellectual interaction and dialogue with some of the leading figures in the West (including Paul Tillich, Hans Kung, and Eugene Borowitz) as well as dozens of colleagues, students, and disciples. Together with the previous volumes, this work examines and exemplifies some key features of Kyoto School thought. While the essays presented here should be read in light of the socio-political criticism that has since been lodged against the Kyoto School and, more particularly, i
Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon’s paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines—including religious studies, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and film theory—Ecce Homo explores the complex, ambiguous meanings of the enduring figure of the male-body-in-pain. Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, Kent L. Brintnall also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men’s bodies and open them up to eroticization. Locating the roots of our cultural fascination with male pain in the crucifixion, he analyzes the way narratives of Christ’s death and resurrection both support and subvert cultural fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Through stimulating readings of works by Georges Bataille, Kaja Silverman, and more, Brintnall delineates the redemptive power of representations of male suffering and violence.