Published By
Created On
18 May 2021 21:19:49 UTC
Transaction ID
Cost
Safe for Work
Free
Yes
The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory
Author: Diego A. von Vacano
File Type: pdf
The Art of Power is a challenge to traditional political theory. Diego A. von Vacano examines the work of Machiavelli, arguing that he establishes a new, aesthetic perspective on political life. He then proceeds to carry out the most extensive analysis to date of an important relationship in political theory that between the thought of Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguing that these two theorists have similar aims and perspectives, this work uncovers the implications of their common way of looking at the human condition and political practice to elucidate the phenomenon of the persistence of aesthetic, sensory cognition as fundamental to the human experience, particularly to the political life. By exploring this relationship, The Art of Power makes a significant contribution to the growing interest in the intersection of aesthetic theory and political philosophy as well as in interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on political theory. **Review Diego A. von Vacanos book fills an important hole in political theory literature. If one can say that Machiavelli inaugurates a certain modern conception of politics, one can also say that Nietzsche announces and analyzes its limits and its end. Von Vacano shows that both thinkers share a similar conception of the political and of human agency. The analyses are always sharp and the argument is clear and convincing. If, as Burckhardt argued, the state can be thought of as a work of art, von Vacano shows us what this actually entails. He also shows us why Nietzsche has to be understood as having a conception of and concern for the political. (Tracy B. Strong, Professor of Political Thought and Philosophy, University of Southampton) An interpretation of Machiavelli and Nietzsche that is crucial for understanding the post911 universe. The link between modern atheism, aesthetic political theory, and the sense of the tragic is drawn with force and clarity. Diego von Vacano has made a major contribution to contemporary political thinking. (Anthony Parel, University of Calgary) The Art of Power is a provocative study that incites readers to consider the place of spectacle and aesthetic experience in the political writings of Machiavelliand therefore, modern politics, as well. (John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago) At last a book that focuses not on how politics ought to be but on how politics is through the guidance of two excellent mentors Machiavelli and Nietzsche. (Maurizio Viroli, Princeton University) Recommended. (CHOICE) . . . Von Vacano has broken valuable ground, exhibits intimacy with a wide sweep of Western political thought, and marries Nietzsche to his beloved Niccolo (at long last!) by way of the books greatest strength close, novel interpretations of paired texts mined productively to illuminate one another. (Political Theory) This book is admirable for its large ambitions. . . .Von Vacano has boldly brought our attention to a serious subject and has earnestly raised the question of whether and how Machiavelli and Nietzsche can help us to grapple with. (Perspectives on Politics, March 2008 Vol 6, No. 1) Vacanos book focuses on a very important but often neglected connection in political theory, that between Machiavelli and Nietzsche.... Vacanos book is a serious attempt to refound modern political thought, or to rethink its foundations. It is a very important work in two respects firstly in highlighting the connection between Machiavelli and Nietzsche...and secondly in focusing on aesthetic dimensions of politics. (Redescriptions, 2008, Vol 12) The author...offers a unique aesthetic political theory, one intended to address the very different reality of our modern age....Von Vacanos book deserves praise... (Jeffrey Church, University of Houston The Review of Politics, 2009, Vol 71) From the Publisher The Art of Power is a challenge to traditional political theory. Diego A. von Vacano examines the work of Machiavelli, arguing that he establishes a new, aesthetic perspective on political life. He then proceeds to carry out the most extensive analysis to date of an important relationship in political theory that between the thought of Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguing that these two theorists have similar aims and perspectives, this work uncovers the implications of their common way of looking at the human condition and political practice to elucidate the phenomenon of the persistence of aesthetic, sensory cognition as fundamental to the human experience, particularly to the political life. By exploring this relationship, The Art of Power makes a significant contribution to the growing interest in the intersection of aesthetic theory and political philosophy as well as in interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on political theory.
Author
Content Type
Unspecified
application/pdf
Language
English
Open in LBRY
More from the publisher
25138
Author: Michel de Montaigne
File Type: epub
An NYRB Classics Original Shakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaignes best readera typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaignes ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeares kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaignethough how extensively remains a matter of debateand that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself. Florios Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaignes and Shakespeares visions of the world, and Platts introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.**ReviewRead Montaigne in order to live. Gustave Flaubert Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt have annotated selections in Shakespeares Montaigne and the result is a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multiculti study of the development of English, and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence. Joshua Cohen, Harpers Magazine Like Montaigne, Florio wrote by exuding ever more complex thoughts as a spider exudes silk. But while Montaigne always moves forward, Florio winds back on himself and scrunches his sentences into ever tighter baroque spirals until their meaning disappears in a puff of syntax. The real magic happens when the two writers meet. Montaignes earthiness holds Florios convolutions in check, while Florio gives Montaigne an Elizabethan English quality, as well as a lot of sheer fun. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne He was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man. William Hazlitt That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on Earth. Friedrich Nietzsche Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity How did he know all that about me? Bernard Levin, The Times (London) So much have I made him my own, that it seems he is my very self. Andre Gide Here is a you in which I is reflected here is where all distance is abolished. Stefan Zweig It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there. Blaise Pascal Upon his version of Montaignes Essays [Florio] exhausted his gifts and lavished his temperament. ...Turn where you will in his translation, and you will find flowers of speech. The Cambridge History of English and American LiteratureAbout the AuthorMichel de Montaigne (15331592) was born in Aquitaine, not far from Bordeaux, in the chateau of his wealthy aristocratic family. Educated by his father in Latin and Greek from an early age, Montaigne attended boarding school in Bordeaux before studying law in Toulouse. He then embarked on a distinguished public career, serving as a counselor of court in Perigueux and Bordeaux, becoming a courtier to Charles the IX, and receiving the collar of the Order of Saint Michael. After the death of his father in 1568, Montaigne succeeded to the title of Lord of Montaigne, and in 1571 he retired from public life in order to devote himself to reading and writing, publishing the first two volumes of his essays in 1580 and a third in 1588. From 1581 to 1585, he was the elected mayor of Bordeaux, confronting ongoing strife between Catholics and Protestants as well as an outbreak of the plague. Married to Francoise de Cassaigne, Montaigne was the father of six daughters, only one of whom survived into adulthood. He continued to write new essays and to add new material to the existing ones until the end of his life. The complete essays appeared posthumously in 1595. John Florio (15531625) was born in London, the son of Michelangelo Florio, a Tuscan convert to Protestantism who had moved to England because of his religious beliefs and who served as a language tutor to several highborn English families. Raised in Italian-speaking Switzerland and Germany, where his father fled after the Catholic Queen Mary I came to the English throne, John Florio returned to England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and followed in his fathers footsteps as an instructor of languages, teaching French and Italian at Magdalen College, Oxford, and, under King James I, working as a private tutor to the Crown Prince and the Queen Consort. Florios works include First Fruits, which yield Familiar Speech, Merry Proverbs, Witty Sentences, and Golden Sayings A Perfect Induction to the Italian and English Tongues Second Fruits, to be gathered of Twelve Trees, of divers but delightsome Tastes to the Tongues of Italian and English men Garden of Recreation, yielding six thousand Italian Proverbs an ItalianEnglish dictionary, A World of Words (the second edition of which was entitled Queen Annas New World of Words) and his celebrated translation of Montaignes Essays. Stephen Greenblatt is the author of, among other books, Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve How the World Became Modern (winner of the National Book Award, the James Russell Lowell Award, and the Pulitzer Prize). He is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. Peter G. Platt is a professor and chair of English at Barnard College. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (2009) and Reason Diminished Shakespeare and the Marvelous (1997), and the editor of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (1999). He has written articles about Shakespeare, Renaissance poetics and rhetoric, and John Florio. He is currently writing a book about Shakespeare and Montaigne.
Transaction
Created
1 month ago
Content Type
Language
application/epub+zip
English