Why Only Art Can Save Us
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Why Only Art Can Save Us
Author: Santiago Zabala
language: en
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Release Date: 2017-09-05
The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today the problem is not the crises that we do confront, which are often used by governments to legitimize themselves, but the ones that political realism stops us from recognizing as emergencies, from widespread surveillance to climate change to the systemic shocks of neoliberalism. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art’s capacity to alter reality can save us. Why Only Art Can Save Us advances a new aesthetics centered on the nature of the emergency that characterizes the twenty-first century. Zabala draws on Martin Heidegger’s distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. The former are a means of cultural politics, conservers of the status quo that conceal emergencies; the latter are disruptive events that thrust us into emergencies. Building on Arthur Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Zabala argues that works of art are not simply a means of elevating consumerism or contemplating beauty but are points of departure to change the world. Radical artists create works that disclose and demand active intervention in ongoing crises. Interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Zabala shows how art’s ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy in the state of emergency that is the present.
Imagination in an Age of Crisis
Author: Jason Goroncy
language: en
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Release Date: 2022-06-01
This book explores the vital role of the imagination in today’s complex climates—cultural, environmental, political, racial, religious, spiritual, intellectual, etc. It asks: What contribution do the arts make in a world facing the impacts of globalism, climate change, pandemics, and losses of culture? What wisdom and insight, and orientation for birthing hope and action in the world, do the arts offer to religious faith and to theological reflection? These essays, poems, and short reflections—written by art practitioners and academics from a diversity of cultures and religious traditions—demonstrate the complex cross-cultural nature of this conversation, examining critical questions in dialogue with various art forms and practices, and offering a way of understanding how the human imagination is formed, sustained, employed, and expanded. Marked by beauty and wonder, as well as incisive critique, it is a unique collection that brings unexpected voices into a global conversation about imagining human futures.
State of Disappearance
Author: Brad Evans
language: en
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Release Date: 2023-11-15
Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time, offering no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provides alibis to perpetrators while denying victims their humanity. For those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is infinite. State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A gallery of dedicated artworks by Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza inspires each chapter, bringing the aesthetic into critical conversation and leading to a multidisciplinary collection that charts a new path for recovering humanity in the face of its annihilation. Featuring contributions from theorists of violence who are concerned with the issue of forcibly removing humans from the surface of the earth, while also appreciative of the complex layers of appearance and disappearance in the contemporary world, the book attends to the many ways disappearance occurs and the ethical questions this raises. State of Disappearance traverses the difficult terrain of human denial to rethink some of the most devastating chapters in human history and their enduring relevance to our lives.