This book develops an original theory of performative beauty. Philosophical aesthetics has largely neglected one’s own actions as a potential experience of the beautiful. Throughout the book, the author uses his own experiences of Argentine tango as a case study; one important incentive for social dancing is to have pleasurable and beautiful experiences. This book begins by investigating the methodological causes for why beauty in modernity has been seen to result only from contemplating external objects. It then builds a theory of performative beauty that incorporates findings from new phenomenology, neuroaesthetics, enactivism, and somaesthetics and that reassesses existing inquiries of beauty. The result is an account that identifies kinaesthetic awareness as the point of emergence of both theory and practice, of creation (poiesis) and perception (aisthesis), and of moving (agency) and being moved (reception). Performative beauty is the pleasure of being moved by the dance where the dancer feels both as a creative improvisor and as an integrated part of the activity itself. A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty—Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, dance studies, performance studies, and related fields of artistic research. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars

This book provides original descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: the 20th-century “Anti-Aesthetic” movement and the 21st-century “Beauty Revival” movement. It also includes a positive defence of beauty as a lived experience extrapolated from Beauty-Revival position. Beauty was traditionally understood in the broadest sense as a notion that engages our sense perception and embraces everything evoked by that perception, including mental products and affective states. This book constructs and places in parallel with one another the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements. In the author’s view, Anti-Aestheticism is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty—denying its importance as a philosophical notion and its significance as a lived experience. It suggests that beauty is a merely sensual experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Alternatively, the Beauty-Revival movement advances arguments for beauty as an experience that extends primarily to sensual experience, but which also calls forth mental products and cognitive and affective states evoked by that experience. After reconstructing these two positions, the author elaborates on the notion of beauty as a lived experience through three key moments which occur in the process of our experiencing beautiful objects. These moments are (a) the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, (b) the attitudinal features most likely to lead to the experience of beauty, and (c) the results of the experience of beauty. The Revival of Beauty will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, history of philosophy, and art history.

A richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, with fourteen essays by the originator of the field.

This collection of essays explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, while further advancing inquiry in both. After the editor’s introduction and three articles examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience in existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism, the book’s nine remaining articles apply somaesthetic theory to the fine arts (including detailed studies of the body’s role in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, photography, and cinema) but also to diverse arts of living, considering such topics as cosmetics and sexual practice. These interdisciplinary, multicultural essays are written by a distinctively international group of experts, ranging from Asia (China and India) to Europe (Denmark, Finland, Hungary, and Italy) and the United States.

Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics views textual and extra-textual worlds as intimately connected, as forming a continuum, in fact. The essays – on literature, philosophy and the arts – gathered here derive their theoretical inspirations from two realms where embodiment and agency are particularly stressed: namely, from philosophical somaesthetics, a discipline proposed by Richard Shusterman in 1999, and from performance studies, remarkable for its current expansion. In most general terms, the point of convergence for somaesthetics and performativity is their stressing the agency of the embodied and sentient human self. The contributors explore the question of agency in its various manifestations. They examine the construction of literary characters, with emphasis on the representation of their corporeality and affectivity. They look into the problem of the formation of the literary canon as en-acted rather than established, and into literary history as retold rather than re-written. They also focus on the problems of literary reception, considering it on the physical, visceral level. While showing keen interest in performance studies and somaesthetics, the authors also bring in the expertise gained in their primary fields of research. Hence, the ideas explored in their essays are drawn from philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, psychology, and hard science. The essays here are concerned with a variety of generic forms – epic literature, lyrical poetry, tragedy, experimental novel, thriller, literary history, theological treatise, documentary, flamenco and opera – in order to outline the field in the humanities where literature, philosophy and performance can meet, and where literary studies can benefit from the approaches offered by performance studies and philosophical somaesthetics.

This book addresses the complex conceptual, historical, and philosophical questions posed by Eduard Hanslick’s influential aesthetic treatise, On the Musically Beautiful (1854). The contributions reveal the philosophical foundations and subtleties of his aesthetic approach. The collection features original essays written by leading scholars in philosophical aesthetics and musicology. It covers many of Hanslick’s overarching themes, such as the relationship between beauty and form, between music and emotion, and the role of imagination and performance in music, which have recently gained prominence in Hanslick scholarship. The chapters, divided into five thematic sections, will provide a better scholarly foundation for a deeper understanding of On the Musically Beautiful and its arguments. In bringing together the various approaches and accounts of the different textual, historical, conceptual, and philosophical challenges posed by Hanslick’s aesthetics, The Aesthetic Legacy of Eduard Hanslick will appeal to philosophers of music, historians of aesthetics, musicologists specializing in 19th-century studies, and music theorists working on aesthetic issues.

Cities are defined by their complex network of busy streets and the multitudes of people that animate them through physical presence and bodily actions that often differ dramatically: elegant window-shoppers and homeless beggars, protesting crowds and patrolling police. As bodies shape city life, so the city’s spaces, structures, economies, politics, rhythms, and atmospheres reciprocally shape the urban soma. This collection of original essays explores the somaesthetic qualities and challenges of city life (in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas) from a variety of perspectives ranging from philosophy, urban theory, political theory, and gender studies to visual art, criminology, and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Together these essays illustrate the aesthetic, cultural, and political roles and trials of bodies in the city streets.

This book reads Alfred Hitchcock as a philosopher of what constitutes the erotic. The author argues that Hitchcock is doing a post-Nietzschean, postmodern kind of philosophy in which he is exploring and creating possibilities of what the erotic can feel like and how the erotic can be expressed. The erotic is a pervasive phenomenon in Hitchcock’s films. It involves irony, play, and sophistication, and there can be erotic failures as well as erotic successes. The erotic is most complexly explored by Hitchcock in his two masterpieces from the 1950s: Vertigo (1958), a story of the failure of the erotic, and North by Northwest (1959), in which the erotic is consummated in marriage. The author argues that Hitchcock has a philosophical theory about what makes the difference. It is a version of existential philosophy that understands what a person is to be based on what they make of themselves through their choices. The author argues that the erotic for Hitchcock is a process of mutual, reciprocal creation of the personality of the other person. This process is complicated by the fact that as one attempts to create the person one desires, one is simultaneously being created by that other person, and so what one desires is also in a process of being recreated in the mutual reciprocal dance of the erotic entanglement. There is a moral dimension to this because erotic failure is, in a way, a failure of the human, not in the sense of a human essence, but in the sense of realizing human possibilities that can make our lives more satisfying, complete, and full. Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophy of film, film studies, and philosophy of love and sex.

In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.