Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts

Description

Carsten Strathausen's exploration of bioaesthetics is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. He familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components and highlighting the longstanding problem of the "two cultures" that separate the arts and the sciences.

Carsten Strathausen is professor of German and English and Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in Humanities at the University of Missouri. He is editor of A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minnesota, 2009) and author of The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900, as well as translator of Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media by Boris Groys.

"If you've ever wondered how we've gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a 'bio-' or 'neuro-' subfield, Carsten Strathausen's Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist 'biologism' he finds in 'literary Darwinism,' 'biopoetics,' 'neuroaestethics,' and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."-John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences