An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy.

The subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that it has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. Francois J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of 'sound', navigating between physical models of sound and the synthetic production of 'what is heard'. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, and Adorno. Listening is always a selective...

This book sets out from a question: If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which undermines and refutes the order of things, the immutable real, the administration of the sensible?To respond to this question, Francois J. Bonnet takes us on a quest that traverses philosophy and the human sciences, but also literature, cinema, and the...

A close analysis of the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form. The first volume of Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne's major work on contemporary art begins by outlining their exploratory and speculative project: not so much to produce a new "philosophy of art" as to enter into a space in-between philosophy and art-between a contemporary philosophy of contemporary art and an art contemporary with contemporary philosophy. But what exactly is the "contemporary"? And how can we make ourselves,...

A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the models of knowledge that they imply. If the term "Cold World" describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World globalization, where our collective consciousness is overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incomputability of this...