Author: Francine Giese File Type: pdf This volume intends to foster a re-interpretation of the Nasrid architecture of the Alhambra in Granada and its post-Islamic appropriation and global diffusion. Taking into account the current debates on otherness, cultural exchange and artistic transfer, hybridization, stylistic renewal and national identity building, this collection of essays explores the significance of the Alhambra from the Nasrid period to the present time. Built as a military fortress and gradually enlarged to a multi-functional palace city, by the 19th century the Alhambra became a symbol of exoticism and reverie. As one of the most important legacies of the Islamic heritage of al-Andalus, its role as a mediator between East and West is more important than ever. **About the Author Francine Giese is SNSF professor at the University of Zurich. Within her current research project Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe she has organized various international conferences and exhibitions dealing with the appropriation of Hispano-Islamic architecture in medieval Iberian and 19th century Europe. Her research interests are art and architecture of the Islamic World, exchange and transfer processes in the Middle Ages, reception of Islamic aesthetics in the 19th century, heritage preservation in the Islamic World, and Islamic art and the museum. Recent publications Bauen und Erhalten in al-Andalus (Peter Lang, 2016) and The Myth of the Orient (Peter Lang, 2016) co-edited with Ariane Varela Braga. hr Ariane Varela Braga is SNSF assistant at the University of Zurich, in the project Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe, directed by Francine Giese. She has taught at John Cabot University and has been a fellow of the Swiss Institute in Rome. Among her interests are the theory of ornamentation, the transfer of decorative and architectural models in the 19th century, and the relation between text and image. Recent publications Une theorie universelle au milieu du XIXe siecle. La Grammar of Ornament dOwen Jones (Campisano Editore, 2017) and A Fashionable Style. Carl von Diebitsch und das maurische Revival (Peter Lang, 2017) co-edited with Francine Giese.

Author: Élodie Boublil File Type: pdf What are the challenges that Nietzsches philosophy poses for contemporary phenomenology? Elodie Boublil, Christine Daigle, and an international group of scholars take Nietzsche in new directions and shed light on the sources of phenomenological method in Nietzsche, echoes and influences of Nietzsche within modern phenomenology, and connections between Nietzsche, phenomenology, and ethics. Nietzsche and Phenomenology offers a historical and systematic reconsideration of the scope of Nietzsches thought.

Author: Bernard Stiegler File Type: pdf In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valery wrote of a crisis of spirit, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marxs theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a pharmacology of the spirit. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.**

Author: Anne E. Becker File Type: pdf Anne E. Becker examines the cultural context of the embodied self through her ethnography of bodily aesthetics, food exchange, care, and social relationships in Fiji. She contrasts the cultivation of the bodyself in Fijian and American society, arguing that the motivation of Americans to work on their bodies shapes as a personal endeavor is permitted by their notion that the self is individuated and autonomous. On the other hand, because Fijians concern themselves with the cultivation of social relationships largely expressed through nurturing and food exchange, there is a vested interest in cultivating others bodies rather than ones own.**