A new book! The Event, the Subject, and the Artwork features the work of fifteen scholars that expand upon the theme of our online issue.

The Event, the Subject, and the Artwork: Into the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Ann McCulloch and R. A. Goodrich

Published Jan 2015. Available from Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amazon

Partly guided by Alain Badiou’s controversial Century and its interpretation of the events and art of the last century, this book opens debates about these for the twenty-first century. This book examines the extent to which such debates can be applied to the first decades of the twenty-first century and the extent to which analyses of events and subjectivities in the twentieth century can be re-thought from the perspective of this century. This book is also partly guided by Gilles Deleuze’s construal of the event as a synthesis of forces, not a happening, but something that has become actual. An event, therefore, is always there in its potentiality, but may not be recognized at the time of its occurrence.

This collection combines essays responding to seemingly datable events, such as the memorialised city of Hiroshima, the coup d’état in Fiji, or the aftermath of Vietnam, as well as the more pervasive emergence of managerialism and the anti-psychiatry movement. At the same time, this book specifically explores the event’s relationship with art and its subject in the sense of both what and who is depicted. The collection engages in debates over the extent to which modernism is an unfinished event; avant-garde moments herald events; socio-political events are mediated in and by artworks; and artistic responses to events and subjects come to represent temporal ruptures and rifts, if not harbingers of an indescribable future.

A popular Double Dialogues title that you may also be interested in is Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts.

Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts

Edited by Ann McCulloch and Pavlina Radia

Published Nov 2012. Available from Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amazon

This book traces the various configurations of food as hunger, desire, and appetite which point to the complex dialectic of consumption and consummation of ideas and forms underpinning the arts. It examines the relationship between nature and science, space and the act of artistic creation, desire and the arts, appetite and hunger. One of the aims of the book is to explore established theoretical and historical conceptions of “nature” in the arts and re-think their relationship to appetite in the globalized world.

Examining the many guises and figurations of hunger in literature and the arts, this book gives an overview of the themes that emerge from the idea of the Hunger Artist alongside the fact of food: the latter’s significance as a barometer of social class; its rich source as a metaphor in literature and art; its unequal distribution throughout the world; and the means by which its consumption can lead to gluttony and further exploitation of the “hungry.” One of the great strengths of this book is the trans-disciplinary nature of the contributions achieved by mapping how the arts in their representation of social, psychological, political, and philosophical perspectives draw attention to the problems associated with excessive human cravings.