The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that have long haunted the philosophical imagination are becoming urgent practical concerns: Where does the natural end and the artificial begin? Is there a difference between the material and the immaterial? In his new work, Mark C. Taylor extends his ongoing investigation of postmodern worlds by critically examining a wide range of contemporary cultural practices. Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of depth, its (...) emphasis on appearance and spectacle, its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of profound superficiality. For many cultural commentators, postmodernism's inescapable play of surfaces is cause for despair. Taylor, on the other hand, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation repleat with creative possibilities. Taylor introduces readers to a popular culture in which detectives--the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter--lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. Taylor looks at the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, the limitless spread of computer networks--all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation. Embodying the very tendencies it analyzes, Hiding is unique. Conceived and developed with well-known designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellars, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text. The product of nearly three decades of reflection and writing, Hiding opens a window on contemporary culture. To follow the remarkable course Taylor charts is to see both our present and past differently and to encounter a future as disorienting as it is alluring. (shrink)

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its ...

In The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola puts forth the radical argument that we are shifting away from organic sexuality, based on desire and pleasure, and moving towards a more neutral inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, age or form. Perniola takes the reader on a tour of Western philosophy, from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre, to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the aesthetic world around us. (...) In order to realize the sex appeal of the inorganic Perniola argues that we must become 'things that feel', we must think ourselves closer to the inorganic, creating an alliance between senses and things. Examples from contemporary culture that, for Perniola, are emblems of the sex appeal of the inorganic, include progressive rock music, fashion, deconstructive architecture and the novels of Georges Perec. (shrink)

"In this exciting and important work, Wyschogrod attempts to read contemporary ethical theory against the vast unwieldy tapestry that is postmodernism.... [A] provocative and timely study."—Michael Gareffa, _Theological Studies_ "A 'must' for readers interested in the borderlands between philosophy, hagiography, and ethics."—Mark I. Wallace, _Religious Studies Review_.

Philosophers exploring the ethical implications of closeness, or ‘given intersubjectivity’, favor an essential human predicament over an essential sexual dualism to explain their positions on responsibility for and response to the Other. This article proposes a feminist ethical ontology that rejects an essentialist base, turning instead to semiotics as a tool for describing the condition of human agency in a context of oppression. The discussion attends to the problems of downplaying the importance of difference and of blurring the distinction between (...) necessary and accidental actions and occurrences. In challenging the contention that response to the Other is beyond the realm of choice and will, this article considers the ethical implications in how this givenness substantiates inequality and gendered embodiment. The effects of hierarchical ontological dualism should not be ignored or misconstrued in an effort to isolate the definitive nature of human response. (shrink)