The work of 38 established and emerging artists explore the creative potential of risk-taking and transgression in contemporary life The unconventional theme underlying the art featured in this book is the struggle between risk-taking and the prediction algorithms that have become a feature of contemporary life. Does the influence of machine intelligence, and the coincident avoidance of risk, homogenize creative thought? These ideas are explored in the work of 38 established and emerging artists in a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, sculpture, video art, computer art, and performance. Featured artists include Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Ed Atkins, Esther Ferrer, Mounira Al Solh, and Shezad Dawoud. The book takes its title from a town on the French-Belgian border with a history as a well-known customs outpost.

Risquons-Tout: Planetary Artists Venture into Risk, Unpredictability, and Transgression

Arts & Photography

Coccia, Emanuèle

Vishmidt, Marina

Ziherl, Vivian

History & Criticism

Mercatorfonds

Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (Commonalities)

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, or smell the world around us. But sensibility is not just a faculty: We are sensible objects both to ourselves and to others, and our life is through and through a sensible life.
This book, now translated into five languages, rehabilitates sensible existence from its marginalization at the hands of modern philosophy, theology, and politics. Coccia begins by defining the ontological status of images. Not just an internal modification of our consciousness, an image has an intermediate ontological status that differs from that of objects or subjects. The book’s second part explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion, and biological facts like growth and generation. Our life, Coccia argues, is the life of images.

Fordham University Press

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, or smell the world around us. But sensibility is not just a faculty: We are sensible objects both to ourselves and to others, and our life is through and through a sensible life. This book, now translated into five languages, rehabilitates sensible existence from its marginalization at the hands of modern philosophy, theology, and politics. Coccia begins by defining the ontological status of images. Not just an internal modification of our consciousness, an image has an intermediate ontological status that differs from that of objects or subjects. The book’s second part explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion, and biological facts like growth and generation. Our life, Coccia argues, is the life of images.

Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image (Commonalities)

Objects are all around us – and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not just an object of value but a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. Our relation to things, Coccia, argues in this provocative book, is what makes us human, and the object world must be conceived as an ultimate artifact in order for it to be the site of what the philosophical tradition has considered "the good." Thinking a radical political praxis against a facile materialist critique of things, Coccia shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making available an ethical life to those who live among them. When we acknowledge that our notion of “the good” resides within a world of things, we must grant that in advertising, humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. In the advertising imaginary, to be human is to be a moral cyborgs whose existence attains ethical perfection only via the universe of things. The necessary alienation which commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, Coccia’s provocative book offers a radically political rethinking of the power of images. The problem of contemporary politics is not the anesthetization of words but the excess power we invest in them. Within images, we already live in another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the ancient and modern legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.

Business & Money

Marketing & Sales

Objects are all around us―and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not just an object of value but a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. This provocative book, already available in Italian, French, and German, and written by a major new figure in European thought, argues that our relation to things is what makes us human. For Coccia, the object world must be conceived as the site of what the philosophical tradition has considered "the good," and the flat surfaces of billboards and posters become the first form of any object-oriented ontology. Positing a radical political praxis against a facile materialist critique of things, Coccia shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making an ethical life available to those who live among them. When we acknowledge that our notion of “the good” resides within a world of things, we must grant that in advertising, humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. In the advertising imagination, to be human is to be a moral cyborg whose existence attains ethical perfection only via the universe of things. The alienation commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, Goods offers a radically political rethinking of the power of images. The problem of contemporary politics is not the anesthetization of words but the excess power we invest in them. Through images, we already live another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.

The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture

We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world. In this highly original book, Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Since our atmosphere is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought that discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia’s account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Polity

The Transitory Museum

Throughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve. There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name “concept store”, which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form. This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.

Grau, Donatien

Industries

Throughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve. There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name "concept store", which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form. This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.

Metamorphoses

We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis - of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don't share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies - is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth - that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia's brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coccia, Emanuèle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Coccia, Emanuèle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coccia, Emanuèle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Risquons-Tout: Planetary Artists Venture into Risk, Unpredictability, and Transgression

Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (Commonalities)

Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (Commonalities)

Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image (Commonalities)

Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image (Commonalities)

The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture

The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture

The Transitory Museum

The Transitory Museum

Metamorphoses