Sub Rosa / The Book of Metaphysics


Book Description

sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics is a three-part interrogation of love, gender, ritual and the body. It heralds a new kind of poetic thinking, one that seeks to articulate and enact a mode of resistance to the obstinacy of present conditions, but which focuses on embodiment, tenderness and optimism. It wants to break present paths and contribute to a collective imagining of a different future; a record of and a practice towards healing. The opening sequence charts the breakdown and aftermath of a romantic relationship. The second, 'Becoming', then traces several feminine archetypes - the mother, the girl, the wild woman, the mermaid, Venus - in a critique of gender identity, summoning a lineage of strongly developed feminine ego identities in order to transcend and dissolve the individual (gendered) subject. The third sequence, entitled 'Ecstasy (Dispersal)' is then a reconstruction: a somatic and poetic (re)connection with the elements via crystal work, dance, somatics and food. Altogether, this collection is the latest installments of Lisette's engrossing attempt to develop a poetics which is more inclusive of the body, the feminine, and the performative.




Creolizing Practices of Freedom


Book Description

Creolizing Practices of Freedom argues that many of our long-standing debates over the concept of freedom have been bound up in the politics of purity—explicitly or implicitly insisting on clear and distinct boundaries between self and other or between choice and coercion. In this model, freedom becomes a matter of purifying the self at the individual level and the body politic at the larger social level. The appropriate response to this is a creolizing theory of freedom, an approach that sees indeterminacy and ambiguity not as tragic flaws, but as crucial productive elements of the practice of freedom.




Book Dealers' Weekly


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"Hailing frequencies open"


Book Description

Star Trek: The Next Generation blended speculative science fiction and space opera in its portrayal of communication. Multiple modes of communication used between characters are presented and the multilevel tapestry of communication in the series is critical in its appeal. This book proposes that these patterns of communication reveal a foundational philosophy of Star Trek (while enticing millions of viewers). These patterns serve both to cause strong empathetic connections with characters and to impel viewers to form relationships with the show, explaining their extreme devotion.




The Open Shelf


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A Book of Essays


Book Description

A Study in the Alliterative Alterity is a profoundly elaborative campaign into the abstract and substantive nature of five, in a manifold rubric, conceptual semantics and its testimonial unfolding by these separate elements in the quest for the interpretive and pragmatic humanistic ideations by its author. The first category, Knowledge, includes the colligation of the lemma and its concomitant descriptive import, addenda. The second, Logic, subsumes the focus of reasonable affiliation among concepts and again its accompanying association in extrapolation of the former titular correlation. Philosophy, as another category, includes the exposition of the various folds of designated and desultory distinction. The category, Humans, is featured as a necessitous ingredient in the coven of their particular consignment. And finally, Academic Learning, is a healthy salmagundi of the apprehension and consumption of scholarship. The book contains a certain flux of alliteration to charm and captivate the reader.




Sonic Flux


Book Description

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.




The Publishers Weekly


Book Description