Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances In the Pulsatile Imaginary, 1st ed. 2024 Rites of Disimagination

Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances In the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites Of Disimagination brings together scholars from art history and image theory, literary studies and philosophy. Chapters of this volume engage with the overarching theme of imagination as a pulsatile force embedded in words, images, and all imaginative modes of instantiation of the work of art in their elemental aspects, expressed in visual arts, and literature, as well as bodily schemata of choreographic and musical performances. The papers employ contrasting and complementing methods from literary studies and image theory, especially phenomenology and new materialism, such as G. Bachelard and M. Merleau-Ponty, G. Bataille, J. Kristeva, P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J. Sallis, G. Didi-Huberman, H. Belting and A. Warburg, J. Bennett and Jason M. Wirth, as well as performance studies. Chapters in this volume inquire into the imaginative forces that disrupt and disinhibit the traditional habits of imagination to create pulsatile imaginaries, i.e., a dynamic process of ?emergence-resurgence? of image manifested in the act of creation and in perception. This process does not properly imply a destruction of image, but rather a withdrawal of image from the realm of representation to give way to new images and new imaginative experiences. The newly coined term ?rite of disimagination? points out to this operation, consecutively implying imagining and disimaging that both denies, as well as validates image ? it valorizes matter. The affirmation of the materiality of image is ?the re-incarnation of image.?

Part I Theoretical Advances in the Pulsatile Imaginary and Disimagination.- Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 States Of Image: Elan, Pulsion, Rapt, Rupture, Caesura and Syncopation.- Part II     Emergences – Resurgences. Pulsatile Flow.- Chapter 3 Emergences and Resurgences: Notes on the Unformed in Conversation with Henri Michaux.- Chapter 4 Pulsatile Choreography: Rhythm, (Dis)Enchantment, and Disimagination in Premodern Dance.- Chapter 5 Passing and Flowing: Rhythmical Entanglements of Writing, Painting and Knitting in Virginia Woolf and Berthe Morisot.- Chapter 6 Confusion at Sea: The Return to Water.- Part III Tearing Mimesis – Ways Of Disimagination And Re-Incarnation Of Image.- Chapter 7 Incarnation and Déchirure; Annunciation and Crucifixion.- Chapter 8 Painting Matter and Trace. Reflections on Horia Bernea’s art.- Chapter 9 Rite of Spring – Rite of Disimagination: An Inquiry into the Pulsatile Imaginary of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre.- Chapter 10 Kneading dreams: Material imagination and agency in performative clay works.- Part IV Vibrant Mimesis, New Materialism, And Otherness.- Chapter 11 Vibrant Mimesis: New Materialism to Mimetic Studies.- Chapter 12 Motor of Darkness: On the Cartographic Visual Drive of Anthropocene Culture.- Chapter 13 A Venture into the realm of the nonhuman - or how artistic performative methods can propose a practice of exchanging knowledge with matter.

Nicoletta Isar is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). She is author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and the books XOPÓΣ: The Dance of Adam. The Making of Byzantine Chorography (2011) and Elemental Chorology, Vignettes Imaginales (2020).

Analyzes imagination as a pulsatile force embedded in words, images, dance, and music

Develops a non-representationalist theory of imagination and the imaginary

Studies creativity across a variety of artistic media including music, literature, and visual art