The book describes the brains and sense organs of 57 of the 139 genera of the class Cephalopoda, many in great detail, as well as a variety of morphological features. The text is well-illustrated with fully labelled line drawings and photomicrographs. Attention is drawn to the many gaps in our knowledge of these intriguing marine invertebrates with a view to stimulating future research.
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile—pertaining to an entomological fascination—in relation to subject formation. The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out entomologically. The book’s engagement with the insectile—its enactments, cultural dreamwork, fantasy transformations—‘in-forming’ the so-called human subject undertakes a broader deconstruction of said subject and demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation. It tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human will be of interest for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in film studies, visual culture, popular culture, cultural and literary studies, comparative literature, and critical theory, offering the insectile as new category for theoretical thought.
In Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media through the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor.
Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene contributes to the growing literature on artistic responses to global climate change and its consequences. Designed to include multiple perspectives, it contains essays by thirteen art historians, art critics, curators, artists and educators, and offers different frameworks for talking about visual representation and the current environmental crisis. The anthology models a range of methodological approaches drawn from different disciplines, and contributes to an understanding of how artists and those writing about art construct narratives around the environment. The book is illustrated with examples of art by nearly thirty different contemporary artists.
This is the third volume of the entirely rewritten, revised and updated version of the original FAO Catalogue of Cephalopods of the World (1984). The present Volume is a multiauthored compilation that reviews 13 families, i.e. (in alphabetical order), Alloposidae, Amphitretidae, Argonautidae, Bolitaenidae, Cirroctopodidae, Cirroteuthidae, Octopodidae, Ocythoidae, Opisthoteuthidae, Stauroteuthidae, Tremoctopodidae, Vampyroteuthidae, Vitreledonellidae, with 56 genera and the 280 species known and named to the date of the completion of the volume.
The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication. Working within an expanded concept of modernism, Flusser presciently noted the power inherent in algorithmic information apparatuses to reshape our fundamental conceptions of culture and history. In an increasingly technological world, Flusser's form of experimental theory-fiction pits philosophy against cybernetics as it forces the category of “the human” to confront the inhuman world of animals and machines. The contributors to Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism engage with the multiplicity of Flusser's thought as they provide a general analysis of his work, engage in comparative readings with other philosophers, and offer expanded conceptualizations of modernism. The final section of the volume includes an extended glossary clarifying the playful terminology used by Flusser, which will be a valuable resource for experts and students alike.
Since the early nineties, the reception of Vilém Flusser was mainly focused on his media theory. If on the one hand this focus allowed to launch the first development in the study of Flusser’s ideas, on the other hand, it ended to conceal other relevant topics and aspects of his thought. Even if his work appears fragmented into several areas, there is a source that produces this variety of topics and methodologies: a deep connection between exile, creativity, and thought. Flusser’s philosophy is thinking in exile between nations and national identities across different languages, between and outside defined disciplines and scientific fields. The entire Flusser’s oeuvre becomes an expression of a collapsed ground, also revealing an unexpected sense of freedom, both existential and philosophical. His path of thinking exhibits radical unfaithfulness towards homeness and reassuring boundaries, both spatial and epistemological, both literal and metaphorical. The purpose of this issue of Azimuth is to map this intersection in Flusser's thought, by taking into account the complexity of his multifaceted thinking and the overlapping of different fields.
All Thoughts Are Equal is both an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an exercise in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his “non-standard” approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking—including the nonhuman—are equal. John Ó Maoilearca examines how philosophy might appear when viewed with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. He does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film (Lars von Trier’s documentary The Five Obstructions) as an example of the non-standard method. Von Trier’s film is a meditation on the creative limits set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how these limits can push our experience of film—and of ourselves—beyond what is normally deemed “the perfect human.” All Thoughts Are Equal adopts film’s constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle’s radically new style of philosophy is best presented through our most nonhuman form of thought—that found in cinema.
