Highlights Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film and connects it to his aesthetic theory. In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty’s often misunderstood notion of “flesh” was another way to signify what he also called “Visibility.” Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the “new idea of light” that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty’s continuous interest in cinema—an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.

In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty's often misunderstood notion of "flesh" was another way to signify what he also called "Visibility." Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the "new idea of light" that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty's continuous interest in cinema—an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty's later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty's interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.

Sligh, Larry Sultan, Carrie M. Weems, and William Wegman.

This illustrated volume examines the different methods artists and anatomists used to reveal the inner workings of the human body and evoke wonder in its form. For centuries, anatomy was a fundamental component of artistic training, as artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sought to skillfully portray the human form. In Europe, illustrations that captured the complex structure of the body—spectacularly realized by anatomists, artists, and printmakers in early atlases such as Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem of 1543—found an audience with both medical practitioners and artists. Flesh and Bones examines the inventive ways anatomy has been presented from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century, including an animated corpse displaying its own body for study, anatomized antique sculpture, spectacular life-size prints, delicate paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Drawn primarily from the vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute, the over 150 striking images, which range in media from woodcut to neon, reveal the uncanny beauty of the human body under the skin

In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone analyzed Merleau-Ponty's interest in film and modern painting as it relates to his aesthetic theory and as it illuminates our contemporary relationship to images. Philosophy-Screens broadens the work undertaken in this earlier book, looking at the ideas of other twentieth-century thinkers concerning the relationship between philosophy and film, and extending that analysis to address our experience of electronic and digital screens in the twenty-first century. In the first part of the book, Carbone examines the ways that Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, and Deleuze grappled with the philosophical significance of cinema as a novel aesthetic medium unfolding in the twentieth century. He then considers the significance of this philosophical framework for understanding the digital revolution, in particular the extent to which we are increasingly and comprehensively connected with screens. Smartphones, tablets, and computers have become a primary referential optical apparatus for everyday life in ways that influence the experience not only of seeing but also of thinking and desiring. Carbone's Philosophy-Screens follows Deleuze's call for "a philosophy-cinema" that can account for these fundamental changes in perception and aesthetic production, and adapts it to twenty-first-century concerns.

In Poetics of the Flesh Mayra Rivera offers poetic reflections on how we understand our carnal relationship to the world, at once spiritual, organic, and social. She connects conversations about corporeality in theology, political theory, and continental philosophy to show the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and modern Western philosophers conceive of the "body" and "flesh.” Her readings of the biblical writings of John and Paul as well as the work of Tertullian illustrate how Christian ideas of flesh influenced the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, and inform her readings of Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and others. Rivera also furthers developments in new materialism by exploring the intersections among bodies, material elements, social arrangements, and discourses through body and flesh. By painting a complex picture of bodies, and by developing an account of how the social materializes in flesh, Rivera provides a new way to understand gender and race.

According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which intelligible forms lose clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he contends, fail to engage this underside, and he suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork", a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction.

A phenomenological approach to questions of the body, ego, temporality and intersubjective relations with the 'other' by a leading French thinker and Husserl scholar.

"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good—or very bad—has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total technological transformation than the early twentieth century. Russia was no exception."—from the introduction In the Soviet Union, it seems, armoring oneself against the world did not suffice—it was best to become metal itself. In his engaging and accessible book, Rolf Hellebust explores the aesthetic and ideological function of the metallization of the revolutionary body as revealed in Soviet literature, art, and politics. His book shows how the significance of this modern myth goes far beyond the immediate issue of the enthusiasm with which the Bolsheviks welcomed such a symbolic transfiguration and that of our own uneasy attraction to the images of metal flesh and machine-men. Hellebust's literary examples range from the famous (Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) to the forgotten (early Soviet proletarian poets). To these he adds a mix of non-Russian references, from creation myths to comic book superheroes, medieval alchemy to Moby-Dick. He includes readings of posters, sculpture, and political discourse as well as cross-cultural comparisons to revolutionary France, industrial-age America, and Nazi Germany. The result is a fascinating portrait of the ultimate symbols of dehumanizing modernity, as refracted through the prism of utopian humanism.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Louisiana-born photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery lived and worked on the grounds of the Catholic church in a small village in northeastern Mexico using a tortilla shack as her studio. In addition to the religious life of the town, she turned her lens on the nearby cantina that occasionally served as a brothel. The Spirit and the Flesh explores the themes of grace, redemption, sin and forgiveness that Caffery encountered in this community--of which she has said, I felt incredibly comfortable in a culture rich in celebrations of religious feasts, with strong, independent, highly emotional people, much like the people I grew up with in southwest Louisiana. The brothel brought new elements into my work: secrets, sensual needs, desire and, often, unexpected love. Debbie Fleming Caffery has been making photographs of the people and culture of her native Louisiana for more than 30 years; this is her fourth book.