Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy Series
The Think Media Series is edited by philosopher Wolfgang Schirmacher, the founder and program director of the Media and Communications division of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. The Think Media series publishes work by artists, philosophers, filmmakers associated with this program which encourages a transdisciplinary approach to questions posed by such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida together with their contemporary successors. The books in this series engage from a philosophical perspective with subjects such as communication, politics, media, literature, film, artificial life, cyber-theory, psychoanalysis, transgender desire.
DRUGS Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth
2011Paperback, 146 pagesISBN 0983915202In Drugs - Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth, Schep argues that the majority of writings about drugs fall into two categories: scientific work that establishes objective knowledge but neglects the experiential dimension, and texts that foreground the experiential aspects of drug intoxication at the expense of rigor. In this wide-ranging an...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesSovereignty in Singularity: Aporias in Ethics and Aesthetics
2011Paperback, 174 pagesISBN 0983173494While the notion of singularity has a foothold in science (Kurzweil) and philosophy (Nancy, Deleuze, Hardt), the tenets of this theory can be difficult to pin down into one philosophical discourse. This text focuses on how information technology is reaching critical mass, taking center stage in how we live our lives, and calls us to pull from ou...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesFear and Laughter: A Politics of Not Selves 'For' Self
2011Paperback, 138 pagesISBN 0983173486Fear and Laughter: A Politics of Not Selves 'For' Self explores the possibility of situating oneself within the tension between comedy and horror. An ethical stance is defined as not selves 'for' self in the immanent relation of thought, forgiveness and laughter. Thought as an image, the Gorgon, a death mask, is worn on the face of the self-cons...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesUpward Crashes Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger
2011Paperback, 248 pagesISBN 098317346XUpward Crashes: Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger explores the perception of altitude as a locus of fraction, from the inception of modernity to the present.Citing examples from literature, art, theory and media, it examines the paradoxical trope of a fall or crash into the heights, from a spatial, visual and ethical perspective. Tracing t...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesItself
2011Paperback, 214 pagesISBN 0983173443This is an aporetic text, one which presents ways of hearing (and speaking from within) the silence of being-an offering that continues to ask Heidegger's essential question, "Why is there any being at all?" Itself challenges us to get over ourselves so we can finally start thinking and living without the melodramatic longings for metaphysical u...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesLaughter and Mourning: point of rupture
2010Paperback, 162 pagesISBN 0983173435In Laughter and Mourning: Point of Rupture, Noensie asks what it means when laughter or mourning (grieving, or crying) overwhelms a person so that the 'self' breaks-down. This work focuses on the phenomenal experience as laughs and cries burst repeatedly into the body and explode into rupture, a syncopic break with time, where the 'self' i...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesAll for Nothing
2010Paperback, 308 pagesISBN 0983173427Prize-seeking, pleasure-driven, self-involved intent has run its course. This book confronts the ethics of desire in the moment of truth. The indulgence of desire is the decadence of the human condition. Whenever desire is satisfied, the desire diminishes and we reach a vanishing point. In time, desire returns. The tyranny of desire is observed ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesNecessity of Terrorism: Political Evolution and Assimilation
2010Paperback, 402 pagesISBN 0982706782Necessity of Terrorism: aggressively reviews the political implication of the terminology and law creation; goes back through history, using a Hegelian-Marxian reading of event by power and violence all merging to recreate a case study of the phenomenon and the Machiavellian usage of it in politics, war and law. Revealing the role of terrorism...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesA Postcognitive Negation: The Sadomasochistic Dialectic of American Psychology
2010Paperback, 380 pagesISBN 0982706766In this, his first book, Matthew Giobbi takes the reader from the earliest days of the experimental psychology movement, continues through the media manufacturing of the social "need for psychology," and brings us to the current political and economic power structure of American psychology. ------ As a critical theorist, Giobbi draws the ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesOn Becoming-Music: Between Boredom and Ecstasy
2010Paperback, 148 pagesISBN 098270674X"On Becoming-Music: Between Boredom and Ecstasy is a critical approach to the possibility of music as an art form in the age of media. It opens our ears and our minds to the dialectics of repetition and variation, ecstasy and entertainment in music." - Michael Schmidt"In our world of conventional music pieties to whic...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesTrans Desire/Affective Cyborgs
2010Paperback, 150 pagesISBN 0982530994Trans Desire explores the ramifications of using desire as the basis for contemporary political movements rooted in a struggle for autonomy, from the perspective of a transgender person about to begin hormone replacement therapy. It examines the affinities between psychoanalytic theories of desire, queer theory and biopolitics,...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesDeleuze: History and Science
2010Paperback, 168 pagesISBN 0982706715This is a collection of essays, most published here for the first time, on Gilles Deleuze's ideas about history and science. Its focus is on ontological or metaphysical questions: What are the legitimate social entities that can be used in historical explanations, given a materialist metaphysics? What are the legitimate inhabitants of the materi...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesPainting as Metaphor
2010Paperback, 184 pagesISBN 0982706707The displacement of traditional axioms of visual arts by new media and technology has necessitated a rethinking of the format of the pictorial image. Owing to the decline in value of the material art object as the necessary end of the creative process in contemporary art practices, art is left adrift in seemingly infinite possibilities: in stru...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesThe Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death
2010Paperback, 290 pagesISBN 098253096XThis book is an attempt to defend the undefendable: the suicide bomber as a figure of thinking, a figure that foregrounds the singularity of each event; and it is this un-understandability-which is part of understanding itself-that the suicide bomber never lets us forget. For, the suicide bomber is the poet par excellence, reminding us of the p...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesTransience: A poiesis, of dis/appearance
2010Paperback, 208 pagesISBN 0982530986"This text shines like the sea: always in motion, in waves, short or long, with a thousand gleams of the sun, and a thousand small appearances of foam; and one is far from any coast."
-Jean-Luc Nancy
Still, duration seems to be considered a "first-rate-value on earth," as deemed by Nietzsche more than 120 years ago, whereas t...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesKeywords: jean-luc nancyThe Image That Doesn't Want to be Seen
2010Paperback, 144 pagesISBN 0982706723When we talk about photography we talk about the image. We tend to look at all photographs as the same. But where the professional photograph is about creating an image; the amateur photograph is about the act of creating the picture. When we ask someone "take a picture of me" we are putting ourselves in the hands of others. We are making them r...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesShamanism + Cyberspace
2009Paperback, 370 pagesISBN 0982530951New media theorists, performance artists, media culture commentators, and politicians have celebrated life online-the virtual unknown-as shamanic, Eastern, mysterious, transformative, and exotic. SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE shows that this rhetoric is actually a familiar version of the other, and that imperialism is at its core. This book combines po...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesKeywords: media psyberneticsTrauma, Hysteria, Philosophy
2009Paperback, 146 pagesISBN 0981997244Trauma, Hysteria, Philosophy includes two essays which investigate philosophically the psychoanalytic categories of trauma and hysteria; each essay seeks a new way to understand such varied concepts as the dialectical theater and the linguistic turn. Media Identity is an attempt to reinvestigate the concept of hysteria as a philosophical not...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesGratitude for Technology
2009Paperback, 124 pagesISBN 0981997279Resistance! this is the central theme of Gottlieb's dense and intense first book. The original thesis here is: if we truly want (to work towards) a society emancipated from the rule of the wealthy and privileged, if we truly want to feel empowered in our lives and our society, we must face the material and incontrovertible historical facts of h...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesMirrors triptych technology: Remediation and Translation Figures
2009Paperback, 200 pagesISBN 0981946224Mirror’s figural imaginations have spread widely along the length of human history. A mirror’s triptych technology, composed of three mirrored figures, each of which has individually been suggested by different mirror figures in the past, appears as an innovative mirror figure in Magritte’s’ La Reproduction Interdite: The Portrait of Edw...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesCommunity without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger
2009Paperback, 268 pagesISBN 0981946208Tony See argues that the notion of a community without identity is derivable from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In doing so Tony See presents an original interpretation of Heidegger in which he was neither a mere Nazi follower nor an "apolitical" philosopher who was solely concerned with ontological questioning. Drawing upon Heidegger's ea...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesMedia Courage: impossible pedagogy in an artificial community
2009Paperback, 210 pagesISBN 0981997228What does philosophy have to teach us about education today? How are we to understand traditional education in the world after Nietzsche and Heidegger? The book takes up the ancient Greek ideal of Paideia and contrasts it with the work of Martin Heidegger. A model of teaching emerges that practices "stupidity before the other" (Avital Ronell). I...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesKeywords: heideggerDeleuze and the Sign
2009Paperback, 146 pagesISBN 0981997201Deleuze and the Sign presents a concise introduction to Deleuze's semiotics. Expounding upon Deleuze's work on Proust, the author reveals a thoroughly developed theory of the sign that is at the heart of Deleuze's ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Beginning with Deleuze's concept of the sign as a "search for truth", the author argues that th...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesSchriftzeichen der Wahrheit: Zur Philosophie der Filmsprache (German Edition)
2009Paperback, 218 pagesISBN 0982530927Die vorliegende Studie hat interdisziplinärer Charakter und beruft sich hauptsächlich auf die Sprachphilosophie, Kontinentalphilosophie und Medienphilosophie. Sie zielt darauf ab, einen Diskurs über das Sich-zeigen von Wahrheit in der Sprache des Films zu führen. Um dies zu erreichen, werden die Kräfte von sprachlichen und visuellen Zeichen...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesBLACKOUT: On Memory and Catastrophe
2009Paperback, 118 pagesISBN 0981997236History is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history's bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesRepetition, Ambivalence and Inarticulateness: Mourning and Memory in Western Heroism
2009Paperback, 178 pagesISBN 0981997295Dostoevsky's last published pages, "The Speech by the Stone" at the close of The Brothers Karamazov, have routinely evaded serious comment. Like Oedipus and Hamlet, the murdered father in The Brothers Karamazov serves as the focal point of the novel's events. "The Speech by the Stone", however, is a nebulous treatise on the subject of mourning ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesThe Infinite City: Politics of Speed
2009Paperback, 258 pagesISBN 0982530919The author employs a philosophical approach in order to conceptualize the space and time in urban realms of the first decades of the 21st century. The so-called 'hi-tech society' has reached its saturation according to Paul Virilio, William Mitchell, Jean Baudrillard, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Marc Augé. Space and time are interchangeably main conc...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesKeywords: jean-luc nancy, politics, city, communication technologies, cyber, cyberethnography, dialecticPropaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution
2009Paperback, 186 pagesISBN 098199721XSince the mid-nineteenth century, terrorists have used symbolic acts of destruction-propaganda of the deed-in order to kick-start a revolution. Today, we have entered a new era where these acts have become spectacular, suicidal, and extremely lethal. Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution explores this relationship of terrorism to the ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesLiterature as Pure Mediality: Kafka and the Scene of Writing
2009Paperback, 144 pagesISBN 0974853445The utilization of an instrumental model that sees language as a means of bringing us towards fixed meaning is one of the greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of the dynamics of communication. An acceptance of language from this perspective constricts our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesThe Organic Organisation: freedom, creativity and the search for fulfilment
2009Paperback, 148 pagesISBN 097485347XThe core idea of this book is that organisations exist to provide fulfilment. Why should one belong to, work for or contribute to an organisation if fulfilment cannot be achieved? Yet the reality of much of our organisational lives is one of disappointment. Too often organisations are remote abstractions. Here the argument is put forward that an...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesFacticity, Poverty and Clones: On Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'
2010Paperback, 226 pagesISBN 0982530978Kazuo Ishiugro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go tells the story of a number of students growing up in a boarding school in England and eventually coming to grips with their destinies, with what they are supposed to do in life. What is both tragic and radically engaging in this novel is that the students are actually clones who will have their organs...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesThe Novel Imagery: Aesthetic Response as Feral Laboratory
2009Paperback, 188 pagesISBN 0981946291The Novel Imagery: Aesthetic Response as Feral Laboratory slowly builds and shapes a theory of reading and how readers participate in meaning creation. From the fundamental ontological and functional connections between author, text and reader, The Novel Imagery develops an original way of seeing the reader's role in the novel as deeply creative...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesPerforming the archive: The transformation of the archive in Contemporary art from repository of documents to art medium
2009Paperback, 208 pagesISBN 0982530900Instead of smoothing over contemporary art's violent and iconoclastic dimensions, instead of sanitizing and making complex artworks docile in terms of archival possibilities, this book suggests we abandon our fantasy of mastery over representation and respond in kind to the archive-as-artwork, to "living" archives, and to reenactments of history...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesCan Computers Create Art?
2009Paperback, 152 pagesISBN 0974853488Digital technology dominates our hyper-mediated culture, and some evangelists are arguing that in only a few decades it will completely surpass human abilities in power. But will computers be able to replicate and transcend every aspect of human intelligence? In particular, will computers really emulate the artistic urge, and create original wor...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesHospitality in the age of media representation
2009Paperback, 200 pagesISBN 0974853461The world overflows with stimuli. Many of these are advertising messages that will never know whether we hear them. They are not alive but continue speaking. We adjust our filters and stop listening to them in turn. In an economy of excess, the advertising industry meets this problem with more advertising. The vendors' cries grow louder and it b...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesSonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet
2009Paperback, 204 pagesISBN 0981946216In Sonic Soma Elise Kermani traces the history of mankind from the origins of society and language to the present, and un-mutes the silence that resulted from forgetting, or refusing to hear, our own mythology 'right-side-up'. SonicSoma reunites the system of 'vibration/matter', 'sound/medium', and the double helix form of 'mind/body' which was ...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesKeywords: her storyThe Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice
2009Paperback, 228 pagesISBN 0974853496In the face of increasing critique of Modernity’s founding principles, concepts like truth, the autonomous and self grounded subject, morals or solvability of conflicts have become sites of contestation and debate. This book ventures to re-think some of those categories being debated in (post)modernity by invoking transpersonal and transration...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesTrans/actions: art, film and death
2009Paperback, 350 pagesISBN 0974853437Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death explore the representation of art, artists and art history in film through two primary questions. The first: why are there so many representations of stereotypical mad artists, particularly psychopathic killers and suicidal artists in film when there are so few clearly documented cases of such artists within th...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy SeriesThe Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings
2009Paperback, 120 pagesISBN 0974853429The Ethics of Uncertainty asks what it means to live, act, decide, and respond responsibly, in the aporia of freedom itself - a freedom which on one hand opens us to the open space of possible possibilities, and on the other, leaves us no stable ground or measure for pre/determined decision making. The aporia of freedom is conditioned by the in...Publication Program: Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy Series
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