It is a great cause for celebration that Statues is at last available to English readers ... The book shows Serres at his audacious, restlessly inventive best, while Randolph Burks's translation catches brilliantly the tiptoe lightness of Serres's philosophical hopscotch and the gnarled gravity of his rhythms of thought.

Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK

Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as the creation of 'concepts that are always new'. It is difficult to justify this maxim better than Michel Serres does, not the least by the title concept of this book. Serres's 'statues' embody life and death, being and becoming, space and time, and history and present to make us rethink the world, and to make us think. This is 'a general treatise on sculpture' that, Serres tells us, 'the history of philosophy has never produced'—until this book, which brings together art, philosophy, science, and technology, as only Serres's book can. An indispensible work!

Arkady Plotnitsky, Director, Theory and Cultural Studies Program, Purdue University, USA

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, Michel Serres presents the statue as more than a static entity: for Serres it is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Serres demonstrates how sacrificial art founded and still persists in society and reflects on the centrality of death and the statufied dead body to the human condition.

Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986; from Baal, the paintings of Carpaccio, and the Eiffel Tower, to Rodin's The Gates of Hell, the Challenger disaster and the literature of Maupassant, La Fontaine and Jules Verne. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, Statues plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.

Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, Statues contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

Les mer

1. January 28, 1986
At 11:39
And 74 Seconds Later
2. Recent Memories
3. Before the War
4. Around 1900
5.1883-1884
6. During the Grand Siècle
7. Quattrocento
8. About the Year 33 of our Era
10. Zero
11. Fifth Century before Christ
12. Four Millennia Ago
13. Undated
Index

Les mer
Major contemporary theorist, Michel Serres, presents provocative new insights into the foundations of knowledge, society, experience and art, and how they relate to death.
Discusses Verne's <i>Around the Moon</i>, Rodin's <i>The Gates of Hell</i>, the Eiffel Tower and many more key pieces of art and architecture

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781472530318
Publisert
2014-12-18
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Vekt
372 gr
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
129 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
224

Forfatter
Oversetter

Om bidragsyterne

Michel Serres is a Professor in the History of Science at Stanford University, USA and a member of the Académie Française. A renowned and popular philosopher, he is a prize-winning author of essays and books, such as The Five Senses, Genesis, and Biogea.

Randolph Burks is a philosopher specializing in phenomenology and philosophies of the body and nature. He has translated several works by Michel Serres, included Biogea, Variations on the Body and The Hermaphrodite (forthcoming).