Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.

The concept of the uniqueness of Christianity often blocks attempts at dialogue with other religions. Traditionally, the argument goes: if Christianity is unique, then to dialogue with others somehow diminishes the weight of the claim that Jesus and the Gospel are unique. But what if uniqueness, properly defined, actually constitutes the key for understanding both Jewish and Christian traditions? Author Gabriel Moran frames his analysis of uniqueness by discussing the implications of that question. In this fluent and conversational work, Moran examines the paradox surrounding the concept of uniqueness in Christian and Jewish religious traditions. He uncovers the layers of meaning that accrue in a word that is in some sense both illogical and yet indispensable for human religious conversation. Tracing a logic of uniqueness embodied in revelation, faith, chosenness, covenant, and mediator, Moran opens a conversation between Jews and Christians that will lead readers to greater wisdom and religious depth.

A classical problem in the calculus of variations is the investigation of critical points of functionals {\cal L} on normed spaces V. The present work addresses the question: Under what conditions on the functional {\cal L} and the underlying space V does {\cal L} have at most one critical point? A sufficient condition for uniqueness is given: the presence of a "variational sub-symmetry", i.e., a one-parameter group G of transformations of V, which strictly reduces the values of {\cal L}. The "method of transformation groups" is applied to second-order elliptic boundary value problems on Riemannian manifolds. Further applications include problems of geometric analysis and elasticity.

This book provides a fresh reading of Aquinas’ metaphysics in the light of insights from the works of Frege. In particular, Ventimiglia argues that Aquinas’ doctrine of being can be better understood through Frege’s distinction between the ‘there is’ sense and the ‘present actuality’ sense of being, as interpreted by Peter Geach and Anthony Kenny. Aquinas’ notion of essence becomes clearer in the light of Frege’s distinction between objects and concepts and his account of concepts as functions. Aquinas’ doctrine of trancendentals is clarified with the help of Frege’s accounts of assertion and negation. Aquinas after Frege provides us with a new Aquinas, which pays attention to his texts and their historical context. Ventimiglia’s development of ‘British Thomism’ furnishes us with a lucid and exciting re-reading of Aquinas’ metaphysics.

Designed for an advanced undergraduate- or graduate-level course, Abstract Algebra provides an example-oriented, less heavily symbolic approach to abstract algebra. The text emphasizes specifics such as basic number theory, polynomials, finite fields, as well as linear and multilinear algebra. This classroom-tested, how-to manual takes a more narra

This book analyses the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour.

An examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era. In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation—from home video to social media—suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms. Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us—those that we take and share, those that we see and assimilate through mass media and social media, those that we encounter in museums and galleries. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices—and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.