In "Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media" D. N.
Rodowick applies the concept of "the figural" to a variety of
philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic
philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic
regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic
representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the
philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth
century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic,
televisual, and digital media. Rodowick--one of the foremost film
theorists writing today--contemplates this challenge, describing
and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking
that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a
genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking
allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and
image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he
journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel
and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida
on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and
Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in
photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the
emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new
stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital
phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new
media, and art history will be interested in the original and
sophisticated insights found in this book.
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