Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter?Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a "herald and precursor" of the future, of our globally-reticulated digital present. Perhaps not since Kittler has there been a study - let alone an anthology - that re-assesses and re-evaluates Nietzsche's thought in light of the technically mediated and machinic conditions of the human in the age of digital networks.Drawing on the first four years of conference-proceedings from the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, Western University, Ontario), which culminated in the "New York NWW.IV": Cyber-Nietzsche: Tunnels, Tightropes, Net-&-Meshworks (held at the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design), The Digital Dionysus explores Nietzschean themes in light of the problems and questions of digitization, information and technical mediation, offering its readers the opportunity to consider Nietzsche's contemporary relevance in light of emerging theories in new media studies, political studies, critical aesthetics, the digital humanities and contemporary post-continental philosophy.Co-edited by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University, UWO) for the CTM Documents Initiative imprint (Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School), the volume features essays and works by leading and emerging philosophers, artists, [h]activists, and political media theorists, including Babette Babich, R. Scott Bakker, Shannon Bell, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jen Boyle, Sarah Choukah, Manabrata Guha, Horst Hutter, Arthur Kroker, Nicola Masciandaro, Dan Mellamphy, Joseph Nechvatal, Julian Reid, Gary Shapiro, Heike Schotten, Eugene Thacker and Dylan Wittkower.

Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter? Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a “herald and precursor” of the future, of our globally-reticulated digital present. Perhaps not since Kittler has there been a study -- let alone an anthology -- that re-assesses and re-evaluates Nietzsche's thought in light of the technically mediated and machinic conditions of the human in the age of digital networks.

Literature in a Digital Age: An Introduction guides readers through the most salient theoretical, interpretive, and creative possibilities opened up by the shift to digital literary forms such as e-books, digital archives, and electronic literature. While Digital Humanities (DH) has been hailed as the 'next big thing' in literary studies, many students and scholars remain perplexed as to what a DH approach to literature entails, and skeptical observers continue to see literature and the digital world as fundamentally incompatible. In its argument that digital and traditional scholarship should be placed in dialogue with each other, this book contextualizes the advent of the digital in literary theory, explores the new questions readers can ask of texts when they become digitized, and investigates the challenges that fresh forms of born-digital fiction pose to existing models of literary analysis.

This book recovers Dionysus and Apollo as the twin conceptual personae of life’s dual rhythm in an attempt to redesign contemporary theory through the reciprocal but differential affirmation of event and form, body and thought, dance and philosophy.

You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional, physical space. But, as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows, and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public with these recoded private lives? Laurence Scott—hailed as a "New Generation Thinker" by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC—shows how this four-dimensional life is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech-philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.

Adopting an innovative and theoretical approach, Greek Tragedy and the Digital is an original study of the encounter between Greek tragedy and digital media in contemporary performance. It challenges Greek tragedy conventions through the contemporary arsenal of sound masks, avatars, live code poetry, new media art and digital cognitive experimentations. These technological innovations in performances of Greek tragedy shed new light on contemporary transformations and adaptations of classical myths, while raising emerging questions about how augmented reality works within interactive and immersive environments. Drawing on cutting-edge productions and theoretical debates on performance and the digital, this collection considers issues including performativity, liveness, immersion, intermediality, aesthetics, technological fragmentation, conventions of the chorus, theatre as hypermedia and reception theory in relation to Greek tragedy. Case studies include Kzryztof Warlikowski, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Katie Mitchell, Georges Lavaudant, The Wooster Group, Labex Arts-H2H, Akram Khan, Urland & Crew, Medea Electronique, Robert Wilson, Klaus Obermaier, Guy Cassiers, Luca di Fusco, Ivo Van Hove, Avra Sidiropoulou and Jay Scheib. This is an incisive, interdisciplinary study that serves as a practice model for conceptualizing the ways in which Greek tragedy encounters digital culture in contemporary performance.

Before the world knew of the thinker who “philosophizes with a hammer,” there was a young, passionate thinker who was captivated by the two forces found within Greek art: Dionysus and Apollo. In this essay, which was the forerunner to his groundbreaking book The Birth of Tragedy, The Dionysian Vision of the World provides an unparalleled look into the philosophical mind of one of Europe’s greatest and provocative intellects at the beginning of his philosophical interrogation on the subject of art. “While dreaming is the game man plays with reality as an individual, the visual artist (in the larger sense) plays a game with dreaming.” This is the Dionysian vision of the world.

Mihai Spariosu here explores the significance of the closely linked concepts of play and aestheticism in philosophical and scientific discourse since the end of the eighteenth century. Spariosu points out that since its birth in archaic and classical Hellenic thought the concept of play has always been subject to the influences of various rational and prerational sets of values. Spariosu maintains that there have been not one but two major modern concepts of aestheticism: artistic aestheticism, related to a prerational mentality and introduced in modern thought by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and philosophicalscientific aestheticism, initiated by Kant and Schiller and shaped by rationalism. According to Spariosu, the first has often arisen in response to the attempts of philosophy and science to impose their standards on art, and the second has often been called on to deal with the epistemological crises that periodically shake these disciplines. Spariosu also looks closely at some of the play concepts that surface in modern science in connection with the Darwinian theory of evolution and the play of scientific discourse itself, as exemplified by the new physics and the contemporary philosophy of science. A penetrating and cogently argued book, Dionysus Reborn will be welcomed by readers interested in Continental philosophy, scientific discourse, and the aesthetics of play, including literary theorists, comparatists, philosophers, intellectual historians, and social scientists.

This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. It shows that many of the book's elements are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and anticipate the later writings.

A timely and trenchant commentary on the centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies. Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.