These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because he was of two minds about the very possibility of attaching to art and to music a written text, a criticism.

A philosophical analysis of the discourses, practices, and effects of representation in political institutions, focusing on American democracy.

Contents - Introduction; The Problem of Thomas Hobbes; Formalistic Views of Representation; 'Standing For' - Descriptive Representation; 'Standing For' - Symbolic Representation; Representing as 'Acting For' - The Analogies; The Mandate ...

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice, this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

Critics of a politics of difference have misidentified these social movements as asserting an identity politics of recognition. Most of these movements are better understood as resisting unjust structural inequalities. Inclusive democratic process involves paying specific attention to group differences in order to transform preferences and maximize social knowledge.

Robert Cummins [(1996) Representations, targets and attitudes, Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT, p. 1] has characterized the vexed problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now." This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the 17th century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Kant. However, the scholarly, (...) exegetical literature has almost no overlap with that of contemporary cognitive science. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern arising not only throughout history, but also in a number of independent domains today such as debates over visual imagery, symbolic systems and others. Such historical and contemporary convergences suggest that the fundamental issues cannot arise essentially from the theoretical guise they take in any particular case. (shrink)

Political enunciation remains an enigma as long as it is considered from the standpoint of information transfer. It remains as unintelligible as religious talk. The paper explores the specificty of this regime and especially the strange link it has with the canonical definition of enunciation in linguistics and semiotics. The ‘political circle’ is reconstituted and thus also the reasons why a ‘transparent’ or ‘rational'political speech act destroys the very conditions of group formation.

Rulers of all kinds, from feudal monarchs to democratic presidents and prime ministers, justify themselves to themselves through a variety of rituals, rhetoric, and dramatisations, using everything from architecture and coinage to etiquette and portraiture. This kind of legitimation - self-legitimation - has been overlooked in an age which is concerned principally with how government can be justified in the eyes of its citizens. In this book, Rodney Barker argues that at least as much time is spent by rulers legitimating (...) themselves in their own eyes, and cultivating their own sense of identity, as is spent in trying to convince ordinary subjects. Once this dimension of ruling is taken into account, a far fuller understanding can be gained of what rulers are doing when they rule. It can also open the way to a more complete grasp of what subjects are doing, both when they obey and when they rebel. (shrink)

Moving deftly among literary and visual arts, as well as the modern critical canon, Christopher Prendergast's book explores the meaning and value of representation as both a philosophical challenge (What does it mean to create an image that "stands for" something absent?) and a political issue (Who has the right to represent whom?). _The Triangle of Representation_ raises a range of theoretical, historical, and aesthetic questions, and offers subtle readings of such cultural critics as Raymond Williams, Paul de Man, Edward (...) Said, Walter Benjamin, and Hélène Cixous, in addition to penetrating investigations of visual artists like Gros, Ingres, and Matisse and significant insights into Proust and the onus of translating him. Above all, Prendergast's work is a striking display of how a firm grounding in theory is essential for the exploration of art and literature. (shrink)