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What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them.
Drawing from and expanding on the work of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects.
Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives.
What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them.
Drawing from and expanding on the work of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects.
Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Enacting Ethics
1. Perceptual Ethics
2. The Ethics of Embodied Logos
Enacting Politics
3. Experiencing Public Space
4. Building Different Worlds
Enacting Culture
5. Polyphonic Attunement
6. Decolonizing Reason
Bibliography
Index
Helen A. Fielding is Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at The University of Western Ontario in Canada. Her research focuses on the intersections of feminist and critical phenomenology, and art. She is the co-editor with Dorothea Olkowski of Feminist Phenomenology Futures (Indiana University Press, 2017) and, with Christina Schües and D. Olkowski, of Time in Feminist Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2011).
"Cultivating Perception through Artworks is written with an acuity
that is as refreshing as it is empowering and is an indispensable
guide for those of us wishing to think accurately and
compassionately within today's contexts of global challenge and
strife. Fielding's art-based cultivations of embodied perception
help practitioners deviate from the varied cognitive-linguistic
systems and binary logics in which we are embedded and through
which all manner of inequities are rationalized and allowed to
proliferate. Her demonstrations reveal how we may reconfigure our
often-overstimulated senses and learn to trust them as means of
"encountering alterity without appropriation, domination, or
fusion"."—Jorella Andrews, Goldsmiths, University of London
"In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Fielding radiantly
presents the reader with living encounters with artworks in which
painting unveils the invisible, seemingly floating sculptures mark
time, and poetry tells stories that cannot be told—thus disclosing
the ethical, political, and cultural potential of her rich notion
of embodied perceptual cognition. With a distinctive
feminist, critical phenomenological approach, Fielding thinks
alongside artworks, adroitly interweaving perception with
reflection in the quest for respectful attunement to alterity and
an openness to 'the movement of life.'"—Mariana Ortega, author of
In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and
the Self
"In this important work, Helen A. Fielding shows us what it would
mean to think and perceive with artworks, bringing them to life on
the page in ways that teach us to do philosophy differently.
Engaging with Merleau-Ponty, as well as Arendt, Irigaray, Heidegger
and others, Fielding brings phenomenology and art to bear on, and
to speak to, one another. This delicate and insightful balance
means that Fielding's phenomenological approach and her theoretical
analyses flow from the artworks with which she stays, critically
transforming how phenomenology takes place. More than a question of
application or description, this is an intertwining that shows
phenomenology of art at its best."—Alia Al-Saji, McGill University
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