Böcker av Emmanuel Alloa

This book is a defence of perspectivism the age of post-truth. At the crossroads of science, art and philosophy, it unearths a tradition that we must rediscover: the point of view is not only what divides, it is also what is shared.Today, perspective is associated with individualism and personal viewpoints. But in an age of post-truth, the only robust answer to relativism lies in fact in reappraisal of perspectivism. In discussion with contemporary new realisms of various sorts, the book makes a case why perspectivism alone can avoid us falling back into epistemological naivetés. A journey into the history of optics, art, philosophy, and social psychology, the book unearths the forgotten tradition of perspectiva communis, which makes perspective the vector of a common horizon. This book argues that vision is never immediate. Rather, that to see through is the key to understanding the perspectival operation. We never see by ourselves--all seeing must pass through something other than itself, through the mediation and the detour of an apparatus or the witness of a third party. Besides the theoretical framework for this new approach to perspective, the book presents a series of case studies ranging from innovative interpretations of classical authors and key moments in the history of art--from ancient painting, trompe l'oeil, and Brunelleschi's experiment in Renaissance Florence--to the issue of perspective in the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson.The Share of Perspective will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, phenomenology, art history, and the history of sciences.

Images are not neutral conveyors of messages shipped around the globe to achieve globalized spectatorship. They are powerful forces that elicit very diverse responses and can resist new visual hegemonies of our global world. Bringing together case studies from the field of media, art, politics, religion, anthropology and science, this volume breaks new ground by reflecting on the very power of images beyond their medial exploitation. The contributions by Hans Belting, Susan Buck-Morss, Georges Didi-Huberman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ticio Escobar among others testify that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that images can open up alternative ways of picturing what is to come.

Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy.

An introduction to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) which guides through the three main phases of his work. Both for beginners and for confirmed scholars.